Four tiers, forty authors

Last August I wrote up a long piece about “tiers” in Christian/theological writing. Go there for the details. Regular readers will know all about this by now; it’s become a bit of a hobbyhorse, as well as a shorthand—both with fellow writers and with editors and publishers.

I’ve found that, in these conversations, we don’t limit ourselves to one of the tiers but say “a high two” or “a low three” or “maybe a one point nine.” Four slots ain’t much. So I decided to unpack the tiers by decimal points into a total of forty options. I’ve also taken the liberty to put an example of the kind of author I have in mind for that particular number. If the author is prolific or tends to write on the same “level” across his or her books, then I don’t mention a title. If not, though, I give a sample book title to indicate which “version” of said author I have in mind.

Consider this your friendly reminder that the point of the original post was not that these rankings are indexed by quality; you don’t get books that are per se “better” as you get bigger numbers, nor are higher tier books per se “harder” to write compared to lower tiers. A lot of Tier 3 authors wish with all their hearts they could manage a successful Tier 2 book. But it’s really hard to do that, and to do it well.

The tiers, rather, are about intended audience, style, accessibility, density, presumed education, background knowledge, literary purpose, and so on. From normies with a day job who may read no more than a handful of books per year to fellow scholars in the academy who read hundreds—that’s the range of imagined readers for these books. Which isn’t to say that folks in the former category don’t occasionally wander “up” into Tiers 3 and 4 or that academics don’t enjoy books in Tier 1 and 2 (I do!).

But enough preliminaries. Here are forty authors across four tiers, limiting myself to authors who are either living or who have published in the last few decades and whose books continue to be in print.

1.0 – Sadie Robertson Huff
1.1 – T. D. Jakes
1.2 – Tony Evans
1.3 – Max Lucado
1.4 – Beth Moore
1.5 – Jonathan Pokluda
1.6 – Austin Channing Brown
1.7 – John Mark Comer
1.8 – Bob Goff
1.9 – Andy Crouch (in The Tech-Wise Family)
2.0 – Ben Myers (in The Apostles’ Creed)
2.1 – Tish Harrison Warren
2.2 – Jemar Tisby
2.3 – Henri Nouwen
2.4 – Alan Jacobs (in How to Think)
2.5 – Tim Keller (in The Reason for God)
2.6 – James K. A. Smith (in You Are What You Love)
2.7 – Esau McCaulley (in Reading While Black)
2.8 – N. T. Wright (in Simply Christian)
2.9 – Cornel West (in Democracy Matters)
3.0 – Beth Felker Jones (in Practicing Christian Doctrine)
3.1 – Tara Isabella Burton
3.2 – James Cone (in The Cross and the Lynching Tree)
3.3 – Ross Douthat
3.4 – Lauren Winner (in Dangers of Christian Practice)
3.5 – Miroslav Volf
3.6 – Justo González
3.7 – Fleming Rutledge (in The Crucifixion)
3.8 – Stanley Hauerwas
3.9 – Peter Brown
4.0 – Sarah Coakley
4.1 – Katherine Sonderegger
4.2 – Paul Griffiths
4.3 – Kathryn Tanner
4.4 – Willie James Jennings
4.5 – Jonathan Tran
4.6 – David Bentley Hart
4.7 – Bruce Marshall
4.8 – David Kelsey
4.9 – Alvin Plantinga

I imagine most readers would rank these authors a bit differently; others would include names I’ve not mentioned and scratch ones I have. I hope the gist is accurate, though. I’m going to use it as a springboard for further reflections later this week or next.

2023: reading

Over the last few years I’ve had the goal of inching my way from 100 books annually up to 150. Last year I hit 122. This year I’ll be lucky to finish with 90. What happened?

A passel of 1,000-page novels, is the first answer. Writing and editing not one but two books of my own, is the second. And third is surely some mix of happenstance, fatigue, and time management. So be it. The books I read this year were good, even if I didn’t hit the number I was aiming for. There’s always next year.

The list below does not include every book I read over the last 12 months, just my favorites across a handful of categories. You’ll see that I read a lot of good fiction and nonfiction. Not so much theology! I leave it to readers to decide whether that’s a reflection on academic theology or on me.

Comments and links throughout, as well as promissory notes on reviews that I’ve written but have yet to be published.

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Rereads

5. Kathryn Tanner, Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism. I read this when it was in draft form, as the Gifford lectures, but I’d never read the book version cover to cover. I had, and still nurture, the idea of writing an essay putting Tanner and David Graeber together in a theological reflection on work. We’ll see.

4. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.

3. John Le Carré, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Not his very best—that’s A Perfect Spy—but in the top five. Even better on the second time through.

2. Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove. The beauty still shines in the story and dialogue and characters, but the brutality is more apparent. “A dark tale lightly told” indeed.

1. Tad Williams, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. As I wrote here, this return to the classic trilogy (a million words in all?) was in preparation for the sequel tetralogy (see below). My love for the series, the author, and the prose is unabated. And the narrator for the audiobook is can’t-miss for lovers of Osten Ard.

Fiction

10. Mickey Spillane, I, the Jury. Not a great book, but popular and influential; part of my attempt to read through the canonical authors of American crime fiction.

9. Adam Roberts, Purgatory Mount. The framing device is gripping, but I didn’t love the middle. Roberts is always worth reading, though.

8. Ian Fleming, Live and Let Die.

7. Denis Johnson, Train Dreams.

6. J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan. Had never read it; am listening to it now. The narrator is Jim Dale. He’s perfect. It’s a treat when you turn to a classic and immediately understand why.

5. Larry McMurtry, Streets of Laredo. Finally read the sequel to Lonesome Dove, where McMurtry lays waste at once to beloved characters, “bad fans,” and any remaining trace of romance we may have had with the West. It’s thrilling. And more affecting than I expected.

4. Mick Herron, Slough House. Having read the first two books in the ongoing “Slow Horses” series, I read the next six in the new year, plus a collection of short stories. In the spring I have an essay in The Hedgehog Review on the series as a whole. It’s great, if confused in its politics; as is the TV show starring Gary Oldman.

3. Tad Williams, The Last King of Osten Ard. No missed opportunity here. Williams keeps breaking my heart, but the books are on a par with what came before. I was preparing for the fourth and final book’s release last month … only for it to be delayed by a year. I’m told it’s written, but the publisher chose to delay it. Oh well. I’ll be ready.

2. Georges Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest. No words. Just read it.

1. John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces. Ditto. When I finished the last page, I had plans to write a long essay comparing Toole to Melville, with Dunces a kind of madcap multicultural New-Orleans-meets-Chesterton Don Quixote for postwar America. Is Ignatius J. Reilly the white whale, a knight-errant, a holy fool, or just a fool? I forgot the answer, probably because I was laughing so hard. The novel is a one of one. Tolle lege!

Poetry

Another down year for my poetry reading. I always re-read Franz Wright, Mary Karr, Marie Howe, Christian Wiman, and Wendell Berry. This year I read some Les Murray and Allen Tate. More next year, I hope.

Christian (popular)

7. Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers.

6. Tish Harrison Warren, Advent: The Season of Hope & Emily Hunter McGowin, Christmas: The Season of Life and Light. I love this new series. Need to snag Epiphany before we turn to Lent and Easter.

5. Esau McCaulley, How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South. Is there anything McCaulley can’t do? New Testament scholarship, theological hermeneutics, liturgical devotions, children’s books, NYT op-eds … and now a bracing, moving memoir. There were more than a few moments that took my breath away. Recommended.

4. Samuel D. James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age. Immediately added this to the syllabus for my course on discipleship in a digital age. Excellent!

3. Beth Moore, All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir. We all know Beth Moore is a treasure. I suggest listening to her read it. I wept.

2. Matthew Lee Anderson, Called into Questions: Cultivating the Love of Learning Within the Life of Faith. Matt is a friend, so I’m biased, but I can’t wait to start giving this book to college students. It’s just what the doctor ordered. And the best thing Matt’s ever written in terms of style. Accessible yet poetic and pious in equal parts. For the brainy or doubting believer in your orbit. (Two-part interview plus podcast discussion over the book.)

1. Andrew Wilson, Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West. Easily a top-5 for 2023 new releases. Here’s my review.

Nonfiction

10. Mark Noll, America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization. Review here.

9. Tara Isabella Burton, Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from da Vinci to the Kardashians. Review here.

8. John Gray, Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life. Good fun. Not just a joke, though. Gray contains multitudes.

7. Mary Harrington, Feminism Against Progress.

6. Edward Feser, Philosophy of Mind: A Beginner’s Guide.

5. Ronald L. Numbers, ed., Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion. I sort of can’t believe how good this book is. It needed to be written; it needed to be written by the contributors involved; it needed to be published by Harvard; it needed to be readable, consisting of short entries by a range of theists, atheists, and agnostics. And somehow it was.

4. Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It. Wrote about this here.

3. Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans: Black Experience and American Culture. To call Murray unique is an understatement bordering on an insult. He died in 2013. We needed his voice more than ever in the decade since.

2. Yossi Klein Halevi, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor. Alongside Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land, this is the first book I recommend to anyone wanting to learn more about modern Israel.

1. Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair. There’s no one writing today quite like Christian Wiman. My review of his latest should be out in Comment next month. I’ve got a lot to say!

Theology (newer)

7. Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz, The Home of God: A Brief Story of Everything. Ten months ago I wrote a long review of this for Syndicate. I hope it comes out soon so I can finally share it with people!

6. Joseph Ratzinger, Many Religions—One Covenant: Israel, the Church, and the World.

5. Jim Davis and Michael Graham with Ryan P. Burge, The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? Every pastor, elder, and church leader needs a copy.

4. Esau McCaulley, Sharing in the Son’s Inheritance: Davidic Messianism and Paul’s Worldwide Interpretation of the Abrahamic Land Promise in Galatians.

3. Jonathan Rowlands, The Metaphysics of Historical Jesus Research: A Prolegomenon to a Future Quest for the Historical Jesus. I wish I’d had this in hand a dozen years ago; it would have helped immensely. As it is, we have it now, and it’s a must-read for all biblical scholars, historical critics, and theologians interested in reading Scripture theologically, responsibly, and/or historically.

2. Matthew Thiessen, A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles. See my review in a forthcoming issue of Commonweal.

1. Ross McCullough, Freedom and Sin: Evil in a World Created by God. Another biased pick, since Ross is a good friend, but an honest choice nonetheless. One of the best new works of theology in years. The only remotely satisfying treatment of theodicy, compatibilism, determinism, and human/divine agency I’ve ever read. Extra points for being concise and stylish and witty without losing an ounce of substance.

Theology (older)

4. Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited. What a weird but invigorating book.

3. Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ. Almost unbearably painful, given the way it cuts to the quick. But also full of the deepest consolations. Sometimes it really is Christ addressing you, the reader, by name.

2. Patrick Ahern, trans. and ed., Maurice & Thérèse: The Story of a Love. A window into the heart of Saint Thérèse. Probably the best introduction to her, too. Recommended to me by a friend. A beautiful book. Thanks to the good bishop for putting it together.

1. Blaise Pascal, Pensées. We all have gaps in our reading. I’d never (seriously) read Pascal. For the four-hundredth anniversary of his birth, I read his most celebrated work. It did not disappoint.

My latest: the ends of theological education

Sapientia is the online periodical of the Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding, housed at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. They regularly publish series organized around themes or questions, and the latest is on theological education. You can read Joshua Jipp’s introduction to the series here. My entry is the first to be published; it’s called “The Ends of Theological Education.” Here’s how it starts:

The first and final end of theological education is the knowledge of God. The God in question is not just any deity, much less generic divinity, at least if the theological education in view is Christian. Christian theological education is instruction in the Christian God, which is to say, the triune God of Israel. Theological education is about him, namely, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ revealed by his own Holy Spirit. Whatever else it may be, whatever other ends it may have, theological education aims at the Holy Trinity or it misses the mark entirely.

There are many genres and locations for theological education. The modern research university is only one among many institutional habitats for it, the latest and perhaps the most expansive home, if not the snuggest fit. The monastery is one ancient and abiding institution for instruction in divine knowledge. Sunday school is another. Sometimes theological education happens within the Church, sometimes not; sometimes taught by the ordained, sometimes not; sometimes in a catechetical or devotional spirit, sometimes not. There is no one right way to do it.

Read the rest here.

So you want to get a PhD in theology

I’ve been asked for advice about how to apply to doctoral programs in theology for more than a dozen years. I’ve had the goal, that whole time, of writing up a blog post that I could share with people when they ask. I’ve always found a way not to write it, though, at least in part because the ideal post would be either vanishingly short or impossibly long. In the latter case, a short book. In the former case, a simple sentence:

ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE

Is it possible to split the difference? I think, at long last, I’m going to try. At the very least, I owe it to the students who meet with me each year with the question in mind, as well as the readers who email me regularly asking the same thing. If I do end up saying something useful to them, perhaps I can put it in writing here.

So let’s do it. The format won’t exactly be FAQ, but I’ll frame my advice in response to perennial queries—twenty in total.

NB: I’m not advising folks interested in English or engineering. I’m speaking to students interested in theology of some kind, or at least a theological discipline. The further one’s field is from Christian systematic theology, the less likely my advice applies. I’m also assuming a Christian interlocutor. Plenty of my answers will still apply to a nonbelieving applicant, but those are the folks who come to me, those are the folks likeliest to pursue Christian theology, and those are the folks who share my reasons and goals for becoming a theologian. Reader beware.

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1. Should I apply to a PhD program in theology?

Only God knows, but here are some pointers:

• Ask yourself why you’re drawn to it. A sweet job? Love for God? Like being a pastor, but for brainy types? Because you like to read? Because you feel called to it, as in, this is why God put you on planet earth? Let me tell you now: The first four answers aren’t good enough.

• Here are two related questions that can help in discerning an answer to the larger question. (a) Would you be happy that you spent 6-10 years of your life earning multiple graduate degrees in theology even if you never became a professor? Alternatively: (b) Even if you never pursued graduate studies in theology, would you nonetheless find ways to “be a theologian” (read theology, write it, teach it, talk about it with others) in your spare time, outside of your civilian day job? If your answer is an unqualified and emotional Yes! to both questions, then a PhD might be for you. If a No to either, much less both, then don’t do it.

• How are your grades? Have multiple professors pointed you to doctoral studies? If your grades aren’t top of the class and/or your professors seem not to have noticed you, there may be extenuating reasons, but in general it means a PhD is probably not for you.

2. How hard is it to get into a PhD program?

Pretty hard, though I’m assuming that you mean (a) a high-quality program that’s (b) fully funded. The thing to understand is that, at the best of times, applying to programs is a crapshoot. I got into my program, an Ivy, on my first round of applications (and not via the wait list)—the very same year that nine other programs turned me down. (A few of those did put me on the wait list; one program whittled down the applicants to two others and myself. I was the odd man out; they admitted the other two. I’m still friendly with both!) There’s just no formula for this, much less logical predictability.

You need to know, at any rate, that you will be going up against dozens (occasionally hundreds, at least on the job market) of other applicants, all of whom will have impressive degrees from impressive institutions and loads of experience—even, these days, with a filled-out CV and publications. Them’s the odds.

3. Where should I apply?

That depends. For theology specifically, lists of the best American programs generally include Yale, Notre Dame, Chicago, Princeton Seminary, Duke, Emory, Vanderbilt, Catholic University of America, Saint Louis University, Marquette, SMU, Baylor, Fordham, Boston University, Boston College, Dayton—in something like that order, depending on one’s specific field and areas of interest. I think it’s fair to say the first half dozen or so are typically thought of as the top tier or cream of the crop.

(I should add: These things aren’t especially controversial in ordinary conversation among academics; after all, the rankings reveal themselves in how hard it is to be accepted, funding, stipends, who gets job interviews, and who gets the jobs themselves. Prestige and symbolic capital are by definition unequally distributed. At the same time, it’s a bit awkward to put in black and white, because academics are as a rule fiercely competitive, deeply ambitious, and insecure. But I said I’d try to be helpful, and that means honesty, so there you go.)

Some schools I left off the list:

• British universities: Oxford, Cambridge, Aberdeen, St Andrews, et al. Excellent programs, but not on this continent!

• Canadian schools, like Toronto or McGill. Both likewise excellent.

• Harvard, which so far as I know does not have a PhD in Christian theology. Harvard Divinity School does, I believe, have a ThD, just like Duke Divinity School (which is in addition to Duke University’s PhD in theology via its religious studies department). For those new to all this … yes, it’s complicated.

• Religion programs like Princeton University (≠ Princeton Theological Seminary), the University of Virginia, Brown, Rice, and the University of Texas. (There are others!) Typically these may be excellent programs for Old or New Testament, for church history, for philosophy, and so on, but not for theology. Princeton and Virginia are exceptions; they don’t necessarily produce systematic theologians, but they are happy to produce scholars of religion, philosophy, and ethics who are not allergic to theology; who, even, are theologically literate, informed, and conversant. Mirabile dictu!

• Evangelical schools like Fuller, Wheaton, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Dallas Theological Seminary, and the various Baptist seminaries. These programs include excellent scholars and wonderful programs, albeit with two drawbacks. First, a doctoral degree from these schools almost always means that you will be hired “back” at them. In other words, an evangelical PhD means an employer pool of evangelical schools. That’s not a dealbreaker for plenty of folks, since many would like to be hired by such schools and/or have no interest going elsewhere. But forewarned is forearmed, etc. Second, many (most? all? I don’t know the numbers) of these programs are not fully funded. That means you, the doctoral student, will have to pay for the privilege of being a student out of pocket or via loans. That’s a tough row to hoe without a job—or with a job that doesn’t pay much—awaiting you at the end of five or six years. Compare that with, for example, Yale’s PhD students, who are fully funded for six full years and receive an annual stipend of around $40,000 and have access to free health care in the Yale New Haven hospital system. You can see how at a certain point it’s apples and oranges. No salary cap means the Yankees always have the best roster.

• Primarily or exclusively online programs. Speaking only for myself, but speaking frankly, I would advise against this—which is distinct from advising against programs that facilitate part one’s degree being completed long distance. Certain prestigious and well-funded schools have a long track record of doing just that.

I hope that gives you a reasonable lay of the land.

4. How do you or anyone else know all this?

Gossip. The epistemology of academe is gossip. It’s the only way anyone knows anything about anything.

5. How should I choose where to go?

Well first, you don’t choose anyone, they choose you. But from this direction, too, it’s a crapshoot. If you have the time and the money, apply to five or ten or fifteen programs! Cast the net wide and see if you catch anything. Beyond that, there are different schools of thought, and none of them is “right.”

(a) Some advise that you find a particular scholar and apply to where she or he is so that you can work with her or him.

(b) Some advise that you go where your particular sub-field of study is thriving, whether it’s Barth or von Balthasar, classical theism or practical theology, christology or critical theory.

(c) Some advise that you say yes to the most prestigious school that admits you, no matter what.

(d) Some advise that you put your ear to the ground and head to the school with the reputation for the healthiest environment for student flourishing. (For example, for decades Chicago has been known as the program that will take the longest to finish while taking the most out of you. It also has meant that those who do finish are assumed to be mega-scholars bound for greatness. Like an eight-year medical residency for a certain kind of surgical specialist. It’s all about tradeoffs.)

What do I think? Depends on the applicant, her prior studies, her major field, her interests, who lets her in, and so on. My purely anecdotal two cents is that I’d lean in the direction of a combination of (c) and (d), with less emphasis on (a) or (b). I applied to my doctoral program almost on a whim, and got in knowing next to nothing about the culture or the professors or their expertise. If you had given me a certain kind of lowdown in advance, I would have expected to be an odd fit. And yet my time as a PhD student was pure bliss, more or less. So I’m weary of supposing anyone can know, prior to arriving, whether a program is a good fit. You see the fit after you unpack your boxes! But that’s just my story. You should take all these factors into account.

6. Are there really no jobs in academic theology anymore?

Yes and no. Yes, there are jobs and there always will be, in some form. No, they really are shrinking, and fast. You’d be surprised at the number of Apple and McKinsey employees with PhDs in religion.

7. Whenever this comes up, I hear race and gender mentioned. These really do matter—myth or fact?

Fact. In this country, theology and adjacent disciplines (religion, philosophy, ethics, Bible) have been a white man’s game for a very long time. Accordingly, over the last half century seminaries and religion departments have been responding at two levels: PhD students and tenure-track posts. Even still, the fields of Bible and theology remain some of the most male-dominated in the American academy, alongside philosophy, economics, and physics. Most others have reached relative parity or have swung the other way, gender-wise.

What that means for you is, yes, you will have priority as an applicant if you are a woman or person of color. If that’s you, great! Let it put a little wind in your sails, though don’t let it give you undue confidence; you’ve still got to beat out tons of other folks. If that’s not you, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t apply, but neither should you go in naive. This is simply the way things are, like it or not. Don’t get pouty. I can tell you right now, that will ensure you never advance one inch in this world.

8. You mentioned “tenure-track” posts. I’ve heard that phrase but don’t know what it means.

“Tenure-track” (TT for short) jobs are the most coveted gig for academics. In a word, it signals long-term job security. Non-TT jobs are likelier to pay less or involve higher teaching loads or be nixed when budget cuts appear on the horizon. Tenure track means that you will begin without tenure, but around year six or seven you will “go up” for tenure. This means you will apply to your university to receive tenure (plus promotion—hence “T&P”). This comes with a change of rank (Assistant to Associate Professor) and a raise, usually, but the real thing you get is the other t-word: tenure. You’re now, in a sense, employed for life. (Not really, but this is big picture.)

Tenure functions in theory to protect your free speech as an intellectual. You can study, think, write, and speak whatever you believe to be true or worthy of investigation, and nobody can fire you for having “wrong” ideas or “bad” politics. Now this is an ideal with many asterisks and exceptions. Nevertheless it’s not an empty gesture. It does have teeth. For that reason you have to be granted it; it’s not automatic. Depending on your institution, your application will weight things differently: research, teaching, collegiality, service. Ivy League schools are notorious for being stingy here, lower-tier schools less so. But everywhere occasionally (or more than occasionally) denies professors T&P. If you don’t get it, you finish out your year (or two), and then you have to leave. Yes, it’s that brutal.

9. Say I’m still interested. What should I do to try to get into a program?

Depends on when and where you are in the process. If you’re in high school, as opposed to finishing your second Master’s degree, my advice will be different. But here are some things worth doing:

• Learn languages. Master at least one language beyond your native tongue. If you can manage learning one ancient language and one living foreign language, you will automatically be a strong candidate.

• Study something relevant in college, whether that be religion, Bible, history, philosophy, ethics, theology, linguistics, or classics.

• Get a 4.0 GPA, in both college and Master’s programs.

• Form relationships with your professors. Not only will this begin to induct you into the world of academia, it will grease the wheels for the letters of recommendation you’ll eventually ask them to write for you. Also, just as academic epistemology is gossip, academic training and hiring is nothing but networks. It’s all in who you know.

• Study hard for the GRE, and ideally take it more than once. I’m convinced that I made the cut at Yale because the committee at that time culled applications on the front end with a hard GRE cut-off score. Some programs don’t care, but others do.

• Learn your field. Follow down footnote rabbit trails, ask professors for recommendations—try to get a sense of the hundred or so most prominent names in your sub-area of theology, and if possible start reading their work!

• Read everything. And I do mean everything. The memory that comes to mind is sitting in bed after my wife had fallen asleep, aged 22 or 23, and reading William Cavanaugh’s Torture and Eucharist. No one assigned it to me. I don’t know how I happened upon it. I was just reading it because I felt I should, out of pure interest.

• Reach out to professors elsewhere. Email them, see if they’ll chat by phone or Zoom, ask if they’ll meet you at AAR/SBL. No joke, the summer before I applied to programs, I physically mailed letters to professors there. Many of them replied!

• Go to AAR/SBL. That’s the annual conference for the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion, held in tandem the weekend before Thanksgiving each year. My first time, as a Master’s student, was a revelation. I met people there (circa 2010) I’m still friends with—for example, my now colleague Myles Werntz!

• Visit the schools you plan to apply to. As you’re able, obviously. I took a little road trip myself; I was able to visit Duke, UVA, and Vanderbilt. Worth it!

• Ask a professor to review your materials, especially your statement of purpose and CV.

• Have a community of support. Not entirely something you can control, but necessary all the same. Application season is brutal. My household had a lot of tears before the happy email arrived in my inbox.

• Pray. I saved the most important for last…

10. I’ve heard horror stories. Is a PhD program bound to wreck my marriage and suck my soul while making me work 100-hour weeks and hate my life?

No. At least, that’s not inevitable. There are programs that function like law school or medical school. But even then, you usually retain a great deal of agency and responsibility for your time allocation. In my view, most (not all) programs permit a disciplined student to get his work done while continuing to function as a healthy person with family, friends, church, and a life outside the library. Granted, I do know people who would reject that proposition. Either way, it is not a foregone conclusion that you must decide between what matters most and your degree. No way.

11. What about my faith? Can a PhD draw me closer to Christ rather than “deconstruct” or diminish or steal my faith?

Yes! It can. That’s exactly what it did for me. But it’s good to ask this question and to be aware of the danger. There are people for whom doctoral studies challenged, complicated, revised, and sometimes destroyed their faith. Perhaps that was bound to happen at some point. Some people, though, just may not be cut out for a PhD, at least in religion.

In any case, your faith will not emerge from your studies unchanged. And here, as elsewhere, naivete is the enemy. You will read books by atheists and anti-Christians and members of other religions and representatives of views you find risible, heinous, or dangerous. You will have professors who repudiate all that you hold dear. You will have teachers who claim to be Christian who openly reject or even mock beliefs and behaviors you supposed nonnegotiable for any confessing Christian. You need to have a spine of steel even as your mind is open to learning new ideas and being challenged by what you’ve never considered. Does that describe you? Or does it frighten you? Your answer matters a great deal for whether you should pursue a PhD.

12. What does a PhD program actually entail?

Briefly: Two years of classes, one year of comprehensive exams (“comps,” written and oral), two or three years of writing a dissertation. Comps test your mastery of basic topics and texts in your field. A dissertation is, basically, a book based on your special area of research, led and read and assessed by a committee of three to five professors, headed by a single professor, called your “advisor.” Your “defense” of the dissertation is usually when you “become a doctor,” namely, by undergoing oral examination by the committee and defending your writing, your arguments, and your research “live”—sometimes with an audience! It’s a stressful day, to say the least. For those who pass, and not all do, the catharsis is overwhelming.

13. What’s the point of a PhD, anyway? How should I think about it?

Opinions differ. Some say: To become an expert in one specific thing, perhaps the world’s most informed expert. I say: To become a theologian. That is, to sit at the feet of masters, to apprentice yourself to them, as to a trade, to be inducted into what it means to be a member of the guild, to learn the grammar and habits that make a theologian a theologian. And thence and therein to learn some concrete expertise.

14. Is the quality of one’s doctoral training really convertible with an institution’s money and prestige?

No. Some of the most brilliant scholars I know and learn from got PhDs in out-of-the-way programs or unpretentious institutions; indeed, some of the world’s greatest minds and writers are effectively autodidacts. Don’t fall for the cult of credentials and gatekept expertise. It’s a game. If you want to be a professor, you have to play it. That’s it.

Now, money and prestige don’t count for nothing. They’re often a proxy for a certain quality floor, along with a certain quality ceiling. You’re rarely going to get a poor education at a top-5 school. And the degree will always count for something.

15. Suppose I get in somewhere, and I’m wondering how to flourish. Any tips?

Here are a few:

• Put your head down. You’re there to learn. Study, study, study. Then study some more.

• Set limits and boundaries. One guy I knew treated his studies like a job: he worked from 8:00am to 5:00pm, then he stopped and spent time with his family. Not for everyone, but incredibly useful for some.

• Don’t waste your time. Don’t read online. Delete all your social media accounts. Focus entirely on what you’re there to learn. Some doctoral students “work all day” without getting anything done: Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok see to that, not to mention the New York Times, the Atlantic, and Jacobin.

• Develop good habits now. They’ll stay with you in whatever future employment you find.

• Just as before, devote time to forming relationships and mentorships with your professors.

• Begin networking not just within your institution but outside of it, whether professors or fellow students.

• Don’t try to make a name for yourself yet. Don’t tweet. Don’t write for a popular audience. Don’t, for the most part, publish in scholarly spaces—unless your advisor gives you the thumbs up, and it’s work you think is A-quality, and it’s likely to matter for job applications. If you’re gong to have an academic career, there will be time enough for publishing. Now’s the time for input, not output.

• Learn how to do two things: (a) read for long, uninterrupted stretches of time and (b) write a certain daily word count. Learning how to skim and how to type fast are also useful skills. Best of all, learn how to take quality notes and to organize them in relation to your research and writing goals. These will serve you for a lifetime.

• Keep learning languages. I can’t emphasize this enough: Languages are the secret sauce of theology (and the humanities generally). If you have two or four or six or more, you’re gold. If you’re stuck in no man’s land with one, or 1.5, or a bunch you can only half-read, you’re at a serious disadvantage—for jobs and for your scholarship. Mastering languages pays dividends!

• Listen to your advisor. She knows best.

• Pray. Not a joke! Better to keep your soul than to lose it and gain the whole world. Focus on what matters most, even in a time of stress and compressed study. Focus on God, church, spouse, children, friends, life. It keeps things in perspective. (Also not a joke: Drop out if this isn’t for you. There’s no shame in it if the alternative is ruin.)

16. Any other tips?

Yes, one: Don’t be a jerk. It is not your job to police the opinions or beliefs or politics of fellow students, much less professors. You don’t have to announce yourself in every seminar as the expert or True Believer on whatever topic. Drop the show. Be a normal human. Keep your own counsel. Be collegial. Even if the people around you espouse crazy things, it is not your job to set them straight. It’s your job to get a degree. Do it.

17. Say I make it to the job market, dissertation finished and PhD in hand. What then?

Not much to say here. Apply widely, prepare to move cross-country even as you prepare for nothing but rejections, and keep up those prayers.

18. What about the dissertation itself?

Not every program, not every advisor, and not every dissertation allows this, but in general I think you should write the dissertation as though you are already under contract with a publisher for a book. Write it as a book, that is, not as that unique and uniquely unreadable genre, “dissertation.” Or at least write toward the eventual book.

That, by the way, is what often happens. Your “first book” is the dissertation, in revised form. Not always, not for everyone. But ideally for many, perhaps most. Sometimes it’s chopped up into journal articles. Sometimes it remains background for the next research agenda. How you approach it matters, though, for what it eventually becomes, or is likely to become.

There’s a balancing act to aim for here. You don’t want the dissertation to try to do everything. You don’t want to swing for the fences and decisively answer the biggest question facing the field. On the other hand, you don’t want it to be so niche, so remote, so granular that no one cares. This also touches on the “faddishness” of one’s dissertation topic, its relative “timeliness” or “sexiness” as an academic subject. Sometimes a fad will get you a job; sometimes it will ensure your perpetual obscurity.

I say: Focus on the perennial topics, questions, and figures. They’ll never go away, even if they’re not in fashion for a time. (Miroslav Volf once gave me the advice that Jürgen Moltmann gave him: Always do two things as a theologian. Take up the ultimate questions humans always ask, and do so through engagement with Scripture. That’s what it means to be a theologian, and it doubles as ensuring you’ll never be irrelevant.)

A final addendum: The one thing doctoral programs routinely fail to do is train their students to teach, even as the one thing they never fail to do is train their students to write awful prose. At to the first: Seek out opportunities to teach, and seek to T.A. (be a teaching assistant) for professors who are good in the classroom. Having said that, the best way to become a better teacher is sheer repetition, and you’re unlikely to get that until you have a job, and the truth is that few schools will hire you based on your already being a good teacher. So, in terms of tradeoffs, focus on research and finishing the dissertation, not teaching.

As to the second, then: It’s near impossible not to pick up bad writing habits in a PhD program, for the simple reason that most academics are bad writers, and most academic writing is meant not to be readable but to impress a small circle of experts with jargon, quotations, and footnotes. I suppose the best way to resist bad prose during doctoral studies is by reading poetry, novels, and literary essays on the side throughout one’s time. Another way is to read major scholars in other fields who write for highbrow general-audience publications like NYRB, NYT Magazine, The New Yorker, The Point, LARB, Harper’s, First Things, and elsewhere. Many academics never unlearn their bad writing habits, and for those who do, it takes years. Just knowing going in that your dissertation will be poorly written, no matter how hard you try, is to put you ahead of the curve.

19. What about jobs? Which should I plan on applying to?

All of them!

Besides that answer, which is true, I’ll add that TT academic posts are typically differentiated by “teaching load”: in other words, how many classes you teach per year (or per semester). If you’re at an R1 University (a level-1 research school), then you’re likely to teach a 2-2 (two courses per semester), with generous regular sabbaticals for research. If you’re at an R2 or R3, you’re likely to teach a 2-3 or 3-3. If you’re at a new R3 or teaching university or community college, you’re likely to teach a 3-4 or 4-4 or even 5-5.

A couple years back I wrote a four-part, 12,000-word series on what it’s like teaching with a 4-4 load. Spoiler: Not a fate worse than death! But depending on where you earn your PhD, you might be told that it is. I won’t say much more here except that the mindset that supposes any job outside of R1 or Ivy isn’t worth taking is deadly. Don’t indulge it, and exorcise that demon if it possesses you at any time during your studies.

20. What about serving the church?

Well, isn’t that the right way to end this.

Christians study theology because of the living God, in obedience to Christ’s command to love the Lord with all our mind. We become theologians to serve the mission of his people in the world. Our knowledge, such as it is, exists to his glory and the advance of his kingdom. It certainly does not exist to advance our ambitions or careers.

You do glorify God through academic theological writing, even when such writing is not obviously or directly “applicable” to or “accessible” by ordinary believers in the pews. I can’t say more here to defend that claim—we’re wrapping this post up!—but it’s true. Trust me for now.

More important, it’s crucial to approach the question of pursuing a PhD as an exercise of love for God and service to the church. That will guide you as a lodestar throughout your academic adventures (or misadventures). If this is what God has called you to, so be it. It might involve suffering; it’s likely to involve professional wandering; it’s certain to involve uncertainty. Offer it to Christ; put it in his service. He’ll use it, one way or another. Expect that use to involve a cross, even if the trajectory of your career looks “successful” from the outside or after the fact.

But if he’s not calling you to this, that’s okay too. Don’t do it just because. Discernment works only if it’s possible to hear a No and not just a Yes. Prayer enters at this point for a final time. If the job of the doctoral candidate is study, study, study, the job of the disciple is pray, pray, pray. Prayer will carry you through, whichever path you end up on.

Let’s say, then, that my advice is not for the PhD-curious to abandon all hope. Abandon all false hope, yes. But hope is not optimism. As for pursuing an academic career, put it this way: With mere mortals this may be impossible, but with God all things are possible—even getting a PhD in theology.

Four tiers of Christian/theological publishing

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about types of theological writing: style, accessibility, demographics, audience, and more. I think about it both as a writer and as a professor who regularly assigns or recommends authors and books to students. Who’s in view? Who could make sense of this text? Is the prose clear, stylish, or neither?

After some reflection, it occurred to me that there are four levels or tiers of theological writing—by which I really mean Christian writing, in this case (a) books (b) composed in English, (c) published by Christian authors (d) about Christian matters, and (e) meant for a readership in North America. Before I list the tiers, let me be clear that they have nothing to do with quality. They have everything to do with genre and audience, and the way a book reflects those two factors. I’m going to list plenty of examples within each tier, as well as instances of writers or texts that straddle the fence between tiers.

Tier 1: Universal

Audience: Anyone at all.

Examples: Beth Moore, Max Lucado, T. D. Jakes, Sadie Robertson Huff, Bob Goff, Jonathan Pokluda, Joel Osteen.

Genre: Inspirational; devotional; personal; Bible study; church curriculum.

Available: Lifeway, Mardel, Barnes & Noble, airports—and anywhere online.

Description: This level includes authors who write Christian books for anyone and everyone. Teenagers, grandmothers, businessmen, stay-home moms, believers, skeptics, heretics, normie laity: you name it, they’re the audience. These books, when popular, sell in the tens or even hundreds of thousands. They are often deeply personal. You get to know the names of the author’s spouse and children and parents and friends. The content is usually geared toward uplift: the reader is meant to be inspired toward hope, courage, and personal change in his or her daily life. These books often contain practical advice. They’re about how to love God and follow Jesus in the most ordinary life possible—in other words, the life available to 99% of us. Sometimes they assume an affluent readership, but by no means always. You can find these books just about anywhere. Their authors usually (not always) lack formal or elite credentials; if they’ve got credentials, authors avoid flaunting them (that’s not why you’re reading their book) or the credentials have to do with ministry (a Master of Divinity, say, or having founded a successful ministry/church). Authors rarely began their careers as writers but quickly become sought-after speakers. These days they tend to have strong followings on social media, a personal podcast, or YouTube. Egghead Christians like myself are very rarely attuned to this level of Christian writing; often enough we’ve never read these books and don’t even know many of the biggest authors’ names. We suppose “committed Christians” read our books, or our friends’ books, or the books we were assigned in grad school, or the “successful” books put out for “popular audiences” by our academic colleagues. Nope. These are the books Christians reads. If I had to guess, I’d wager they make up more than 90% of Christian publishing sales in the U.S. If neither pastors’ libraries nor seminaries existed, I think that percentage would approach (if not quite reach) 100%.

Tier 2: Popular

Audience: College-educated Christians who enjoy reading to learn more about the faith.

Examples: Tish Harrison Warren, Tim Keller, John Mark Comer, Dane Ortlund, Jemar Tisby, N. T. Wright, Barbara Brown Taylor, Anne Lamott, Wesley Hill, Austin Channing Brown, Andy Crouch, Lauren Winner, Andrew Wilson, James K. A. Smith, Tara Isabella Burton, Esau McCaulley, Ben Myers, Rod Dreher, John Piper, Richard Foster, Eugene Peterson, Cornel West, C. S. Lewis.

Genre: Intro-level introduction to Christian doctrines or ideas; mix of memoir and argument; adaptation of a sermon series into book; Christian treatment of relevant or controversial topic; presentation of Christian faith as a whole; higher-level study of Bible or Christian teaching.

Available: Mostly online, but sometimes in major bookstores like Barnes & Noble.

Description: This level includes authors who write books for Christians with a college degree, usually Christians who would describe themselves as “readers.” These readers, though, are not theological in any formal sense. They did not go to seminary. They are not pastors. They don’t know jargon. Books in this group do not contain words like “eschatological.” If you happen upon that word in a book, you know immediately that you’re already in Tier 3 or 4. The readers in this level may be serious Christians, they may be thoughtful, they may be good readers—but they are not interested in anything with even a whiff of the academic. Tier 2 books, accordingly, are on the shorter side; they don’t shy away from the personal or anecdotal; they lack footnotes (some will have endnotes); they assume faith on the part of the reader; they feel like a gentle conversation between the author (a teacher) and the reader (a learner). Here credentials do matter. The author is almost always a pastor, a professor, or a graduate of a seminary or doctoral program. He or she possesses some kind of expertise, one that invites (without threatening) the reader. The concepts in the book may be complex or abstract, but the language in which the concepts are presented is not. It is as simple as possible. Not only no jargon, but little vocabulary above a high school level. That’s no slam on either reader or writer: as Orwell and Lewis both observed, it’s harder to write this way than it is to rely on fancy words as a crutch. Go read Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. The prose is flawless, and yet there may not be a single word in six hundred pages that an eighth grader (at least, one from Texas) wouldn’t recognize. That’s a gift and a virtue, not a shortcoming. In any case, Tier 2 books populate the curricula of larger churches with a high proportion of college-educated folks. In churches that don’t fit that bill, it’s almost always books from Tier 1.

Tier 3: Highbrow

Audience: Seminarians, pastors, scholars, literary types, lay intellectuals.

Examples: Beth Felker Jones, Wendell Berry, Alan Jacobs, Fleming Rutledge, David Bentley Hart, Barbara Brown Taylor, Wesley Hill, Tara Isabella Burton, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, N. T. Wright, Cornel West, Miroslav Volf, Stanley Hauerwas, Ross Douthat, Dorothy Sayers, James Cone, Zena Hitz, Francis Spufford, Jonathan Tran, Peter Leithart, Brian Bantum, James K. A. Smith, Esau McCaulley, Lauren Winner, Andy Crouch, Phil Christman, Luke Timothy Johnson, Rod Dreher, John Piper, Paul Griffiths, Tim Keller, Eugene Peterson, Justo L. González.

Genre: Textbook; magazine essay; popularization of academic scholarship; intellectual history; popular genealogy; political screed; think-tank intervention; “public discourse”/“public intellectual” writing; church-facing theological scholarship; work of interest to pastoral ministry; biblical commentary; public-facing scholarship; etc.

Available: Usually only online, aside from a few very famous authors.

Description: This level includes authors who write for a wide audience of non-specialists who are otherwise interested in serious intellectual and academic Christian thought. Think of books in this group as a way of making the insights of academic scholarship available to folks who either are not academics or, being academics, do not belong to the field in question. Likewise books in this tier imagine a lay reader without formal expertise but who has time, energy, and interest enough to devote themselves to understanding a book written with style about dense matters—like an amateur tinkerer dabbling in quantum mechanics. Such a reader is willing to do the work, but don’t treat her like she’s already a member of the guild. If she were, she wouldn’t need to read your book. Books in this category may have footnotes, longer sentences, a bigger page count, and a presumption of literary and historical background knowledge on the part of the reader. Or perhaps the work in question is a textbook written specifically for upper-level undergraduates or graduate students. There may be explanation going on, but it’s in the context of active teaching; it’s not the sort of book one would pick up and read for pleasure. Living writers that come to mind here often publish in highbrow “popular” venues like Commonweal or First Things or The New Atlantis or The Point or The New Yorker or The New York Times or The New Republic or The Atlantic. Readers are self-conscious, if a mite embarrassed, about their status as intellectuals and readerly readers. They expect nuance, expertise, credentials, even authority. Authors, in turn, supply them in spades.

Tier 4: Scholarly

Audience: Fellow scholars and academics as well as some pastors and few laypeople.

Examples: Kathryn Tanner, Justo L. González, Willie James Jennings, Katherine Sonderegger, Sarah Coakley, David Bentley Hart, James Cone, Jean Porter, Fleming Rutledge, Stanley Hauerwas, Frances Young, Luke Timothy Johnson, Miroslav Volf, Eleonore Stump, Jennifer Herdt, J. Kameron Carter, Francesca Murphy, Bruce Marshall, Linn Marie Tonstad, Kevin Hector, Jonathan Tran, Eric Gregory, Paul Griffiths, John Webster, Cornel West.

Genre: Monograph; dissertation; peer-reviewed journal article; scholarly tome; biblical commentary; etc.

Available: Online, university presses, campus bookstores, or academic conferences.

Description: This level includes academics producing professional scholarship for their peers. They have an audience of one: people like them. They do not define jargon; they revel in it. They do not transliterate, much less translate; they write in Greek or Sanskrit and assume you can read it as well as they can. Their pages are full of footnotes: the more the better. They are scholars writing for scholars, often hyper-specialized scholars inhabiting sub-sub-sub-fields (studying only a single book of the Bible, or a specific century in church history, or a particular doctrine like predestination). If any eavesdroppers want to find some profit in their work, they’re welcome to do so, but the content, style, genre, and assumed audience is unchanged: it’s academic. That’s not to say their books won’t have an impact. Their ideas, if good or interesting or widely received and accepted, will trickle down the tiers over the years and even decades until ordinary folks who have never heard of the source material will learn about or even share the ideas in question. That takes time, though, and has nothing to do with book sales. Academics don’t sell books. That’s not the business they got into. Someone or something else pays the bills, to the extent that they are paid. Which is why scholarly books so often do not appear to have been written with accessibility, style, or even clarity in mind. Other goods and ends are being sought (whether or not such a tradeoff is prudent or defensible).

*

Okay. So those are the tiers. Here are some further notes and thoughts, in no particular order:

• If you’re thinking in terms of publishing and thus in terms of sales, we might put it this way: a Tier 4 book sells in the hundreds, a Tier 3 book in the thousands, a Tier 2 book in the tens of thousands, and a Tier 1 book (if successful by its own standards) in the hundreds of thousands.

• I did my best to duplicate names across tiers. I’m not aware of an author, at least a living author, who could reasonably be placed in all four tiers—unless, I suppose, you counted an author, like Lewis, who covered Tiers 2-4 and wrote fiction or children’s stories (and could thus be included in Tier 1). Regardless, although I listed a few dead authors, I tried to giving living examples.

• Who are the platonic ideals for each level? For Tier 1 I’d say Beth Moore or Max Lucado. For Tier 2 I’d say Tish Harrison Warren’s Liturgy of the Ordinary, Ben Myers’ Apostles’ Creed, or John Mark Comer’s Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. For Tier 3 I’d say most everything Lewis and Chesterton wrote; among the living, think Tim Keller or Zena Hitz, Beth Felker Jones or Alan Jacobs. For Tier 4, I’d say just about any academic systematic theologian: Tanner, Sonderegger, Jennings, Tran, Herdt, et al.

• In my experience, when academics refer to “writing for a popular audience” or “writing a popular book,” what they mean is Tier 3, not Tier 2 (and certainly not Tier 1). Jamie Smith is a great example. Some of his scholarship on French continental philosophy is clearly Tier 4. Desiring the Kingdom is Tier 3. You Are What You Love is Tier 2. Early on in my teaching, I assigned DTK to upperclassmen in a gen-ed course. They drowned. Then YAWYL came out. Now I assign that instead, and even still they have a bit of trouble in later chapters—but they don’t drown. It’s at their level. They can tread water and occasionally swim a bit.

• For academics, then, our training seriously warps our ability to tell what kind of writing ordinary people—my term for non-academics—find accessible and engaging. There is a kind of Tier 3 writing, for example, that is full of rhetorical flourishes and feels, to a theologically trained academic, bracing and lovely and passionate and compelling. Hand it to a normie, though, and they can’t make heads or tails of it. It’s impenetrable. The sentences are long; the vocabulary is dense; the presumed audience is not “ordinary person with a day job.” We have to learn how to read with eyes other than our own.

• The fatal symptom of all failed “popular” writing by academics is jargon. The second is complex syntax. The third is the inability to make a simple point with a brief declarative sentence. The fourth is the presumption of all manner of background knowledge on the part of the reader, most of which she has never even heard of. If you’re an academic and you want to write for a wide audience, it’s these four things you must be purged of. (A fifth is name-dropping and ism-mongering. My students always tell me, when they read Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion, that they get “lost in the names and dates.” You know you’re writing a Tier 3 book if you refer to “Eliot” or “Auden” or “Cardinal Newman” or even “Luther” without a first name and introduction. Them’s the facts, whether you like it or not.)

• I want to reiterate the point I made in my description of Tier 1 above: These are the books that American Christians read. They sell nearly all the copies; they speak at nearly all the events; they inform the minds and hearts of countless believers every day. Mourn it or celebrate it, it’s best to accept it. And some folks writing in Tier 1 are fantastic! I’ll not permit the name of Beth Moore besmirched in my presence. Just about every Christian woman in my extended family or home church has been reading, studying, and listening to Beth Moore for three decades. Praise God for that. (And if you haven’t read her memoir, get thee to Mardel pronto. Even better, listen to it on audio.) Nevertheless, it’s crucial to grasp that more people know who Sadie Robertson Huff is than, say, Tim Keller or Tish Warren. Sadie’s got five million followers on Instagram, for goodness’ sake. This is the world we live in.

• For people like me—meaning academics who’d like to write for as wide a popular audience as possible—Tier 2 is the sweet spot. My revised dissertation (published in 2022 with Eerdmans) is Tier 4. My doctrine of Scripture (published in 2021 with Cascade) is Tier 3: accessible to pastors, seminarians, and normies who want to stretch themselves. My next two books (more about those here) are Tier 2. They were both the most fun I’ve had writing and the most challenging to write. Why? Because I had to let go of all my crutches and shortcuts. I had to say in ten words what I’m used to saying in fifty. To say in four sentences what I want twelve for. To make a claim without a footnote defending me from attacks on all sides. To say something about God, Scripture, or the gospel that a Christian of any age who’s never read another theological book in her life could understand without a problem. It’s hard, y’all! And for that reason it’s really nice to work with editors who get it. Todd Hains at Lexham was a taskmaster, breaking down my four-line sentences into two; simplifying my syntax and diction; strangling my jargon; murdering my adverbs and adjectives; in general, killing my darlings. Thank God for Todd. Someone might actually read my book next year because of him. Get yourself an editor, or at least honest friends, who will tell you exactly how unreadable your “popular” writing is. Then get revising.

• Here’s a delicate topic that, I hope, I’ll be able to discuss with appropriate nuance and clarity. Because I have a lot to say about it, I’m going to leave the bullet points to make the point…

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In theology and Christian writing generally, it’s been a man’s game until the last half century or so. It hasn’t been a white man’s game, it’s important to note, since Christian writing from the beginning has come from places as diverse as north Africa, the middle East, Russia, eastern Europe, South America, and elsewhere. Even calling writing from Europe “white” is unhelpful, since it’s overly generic or anachronistic (or both). Saint Paul wrote in Greece and Saint Augustine in Hippo and Saint Leo in Rome and Saint Anselm in Britain and Saint Basil in Caesarea and Saint Athanasius in Egypt and Saint Cyril in Jerusalem and Saint Ephrem in Nisibis and Saint John in Damascus and Saint Teresa in Spain and Saint Thérèse in France—and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. It makes no sense to call such writers “white,” even if much that they wrote is part of the so-called “Western” inheritance or patrimony. Such a term fails to describe their literal skin color, and most of them lived before (and thus innocent of) the invention of race.

Having said that, just as there is a legitimate concern to create space, in scholarship as well as classroom syllabi, for women Christian writers, so there is a legitimate concern to create space for living Christian writers of color, particularly those who come from cultures or groups rendered marginal by the centuries-long dominance of white Christian voices in North American contexts. Stipulate with me that this concern is sincere, that it is legitimate, and that it is worthy of attention and support on Christianly specific grounds. Now think about my tiers of theological publishing above.

For the moment think only of women writers. It seems to me that women are most represented in Tier 1. It wouldn’t surprise me, in fact, if aggregate sales of Christian books favor women authors (though I have no idea if that’s true). I would guess that Tier 4 is where women are next most represented, in terms of authors of books published as a percentage of the whole group. After just a few generations, women swell the ranks of the theological disciplines, and the “big names” that define the field as just as likely to be women as men. (Again, this is anecdotal, but stick with me.)

My sense is that where women continue to be under-represented is in Tiers 2 and 3, and I would submit that Tier 2 is where there are fewest women authors. Allow that I may be right about this. Why might that be?

One reason is that women who enter the theological academy operate from a felt pressure, and often explicit advice, to prove their bona fides to their (predominantly male) colleagues. They do so by producing top-level scholarship without a trace of the popular in it.

Another reason is ordinary institutional pressures: T&P requirements.

A third reason, even following tenure, is a general sense (which applies to men too) that “real” scholarship never descends beneath Tier 3. Maybe you write a textbook. Maybe you “dumb down” your hyper-specialized research for non-experts within the academy. But you don’t try to appeal to the masses. You don’t write “for everyone.” You’re a scholar! That’s beneath us.

A fourth reason is a side effect of the success of women writers in Tier 1: a certain perception of what it means to be “a female Christian writer” who “writes for a [read: female] popular audience.” This isn’t just a genre. It’s a whole sensibility. There are unwritten rules here. You need a social media presence. You need to interact with your fans. You need pictures, and not just of you but of your family (ideally your beautiful children). You need to “let people in.” If you don’t, is anyone really going to buy your books or pay you to speak?

A fifth and final reason connects back to something I said in my description of Tier 2 books above: unlike in Tier 1, Tier 2 books trade on the credentials or authority of the author. But among Christians, men are far more likely to possess credentials, authority, or both. They’re more likely to be ordained; they’re more likely to be a pastor; they’re more likely to have graduated from seminary. That’s what makes a Tish Warren such a remarkable success story. When she published her first book, she was a proverbial “nobody” without a social media following, without a speaker circuit, without a tenure-track professorship. But she was an ordained priest. That, plus her ability to pack theological substance into clear and beautiful prose, made her something of a unicorn. Otherwise Tier 2 is almost all men.

Consider Tara Isabella Burton. Like Warren she’s another exception that proves the rule. To be honest, she’s more of a 2.5 than a 2.0 on my scale. Her books lie somewhere between “popular” and “highbrow.” My students have to work when they read them, though they do eventually make it out the other side, and they’re not upset with me (or her) when they do. Now notice: Burton has a doctorate in theology from Oxford—but she didn’t go the academic route. She became a religion journalist and a novelist. She mostly writes highbrow nonfiction in a public-intellectual vein, even as her two books about Christianity in America are just accessible enough to qualify as “assignable” to my twentysomething college students.

So here’s the thought I want to float. It’s two sided.

On one hand, suppose again that you’re a professor, like me, who assigns books to students. You’d like these books to be authored by a representative swath of humanity, not just white dudes. The books, however, have to be both readable and Christian; ideally belonging to Tier 2. Not just that, but at least in my context, they can’t be morally or theologically liberal; they need to be nonpartisan, mainstream, or traditional. I’m not assigning my students a book that denies the resurrection of Jesus, or one that assumes anyone with a brain is a socialist, or one that argues abortion is a moral good. I’m not even assigning a book that’s outright partisan in the sense that it presumes “no serious American Christian could vote for/against X.” Remember, I’m teaching 21-year-olds who’ve never heard the word “theology” or “ethics” before. They’re babies. And I live in west Texas. So no ideologically progressive books (which is not to say I don’t assign essays, excerpts, and chapters written by thinkers from across the political spectrum: I do).

Here’s my question for you. Remember that I’m a theologian in need of theological texts to assign in general-education undergraduate theology courses for majors in business, nursing, and education. These texts need to be squarely in Tier 2 (with one or two exceptions for quality Tier 3 books). What do you propose I assign? Which authors do you recommend? Who fits the bill?

The truth is, if you’re avoiding Tier 1 and Tier 4, and certainly if you’re avoiding Tier 3, your choices are profoundly, even shockingly limited. That realization is what generated this entire idea about the different tiers of Christian/theological publishing. I assign Warren and Burton in my classes. I assign Beth Felker Jones and Jemar Tisby and James Cone, too. In addition, my students can handle Barbara Brown Taylor, Lauren Winner, and (if they’re Bible/ministry majors) Fleming Rutledge. I’ll give them, as well, small doses of Kathryn Tanner or Frances Young or Ellen Charry. But the sweet spot, as I’ve learned, if I want students to dive deep, to gain from the reading, and not to resent me or the text, is Tier 2. And if you share the goal of assigning women as well as men, black authors as well as white (not to mention others), then there just aren’t that many to choose from—assuming living authors, assuming my other constraints, assuming my context, assuming my subject matter.

That’s a sour note to end on, so let me turn to the other side of the coin. If I were giving advice to a friend already in the academy or to a student just about to begin the long trek through graduate study toward a doctorate, here’s what I’d say. If you’re a woman or person of color and you have any interest at all in writing for an audience beyond the university, then begin preparing today for publishing a Tier 2 book. That’s where the market inefficiency is. That’s where the audience is. That’s where you can make a difference. Aim for any tier you please, but if your desire is to write for a popular readership and you also have the talent and institutional support to do so—it’s there for the taking. Have at it.

And while you’re at it, call me up on pub day. I’ll add your book to the syllabus on the spot.

Mapping academic theology

Academic theology is a tangled web of influences and institutions. Happily, John Shelton has done us all a favor by untangling some of the thornier knots in a convenient and accessible way.

How? By creating a single image that traces lines of influence, whether direct (via graduate teaching or serving as a doctoral advisor) or indirect (via published work or working as colleagues in the same school), between and among some of the most prominent scholars of Christian theology and ethics since the 1960s. These scholars, to be clear, do not form an exhaustive list; they are Anglo-American mainline Protestants, for the most part, inhabiting (by training or employment) elite Anglo-American mainline Protestant institutions. Theologians, whether systematic or moral, from outside the Anglophone world, not to mention Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and evangelicals, are almost entirely unrepresented; as are historical and patristic and medieval and pastoral and practical and all other theological disciplines.

Nevertheless, given the institutional prestige and influence of American mainline institutions, programs, and professors, the result is both impressive and illuminating. Behold:

(You can view/download the image here.)

Some initial reactions and reflections:

• Lotta dudes! To be expected, but still.

• If I said this image tracks Anglo-American mainline Protestants, what I meant was: this is a web of Ivy League WASP Theologians. Which, again, is to be expected: they’re the ones with postwar clout and influence. But it’s one thing to know that, another to see it laid out this way. So few institutions producing so many students, who then become major scholars in their own right, double back, get hired by the same institution that trained them (or a sister school), and start advising students themselves. So the wheel keeps spinning.

• Based on this image, it was the later boomers who began to break the all-male rule in academic theology: Tanner, Jones, Kilby, Sonderegger, Coakley, Herdt.

• Cone and Carter and Katongole are here. I imagine Willie James Jennings, like Paul Griffiths, is not here because he’d be a circle unto himself, rather than participating in these lines of descent. But to complete the web (which I could, I guess, but my facility with this sort of software is less advanced than a child’s) I’d probably want to add a womanist segment that touches Cone and King and Tillich and Carter but also branches off on its own: Williams, Cannon, Townes, Floyd-Thomas, and Marshall Turman.

• Not everyone on this list would fit the bill of “orthodox,” but there’s a general family resemblance that makes sense of most of the names. The same goes for the style of theology being practiced: either moral or systematic. I suspect that’s why, on one hand, someone like Catherine Keller isn’t found here; and, on the other, why we don’t see prominent Christian philosophers and analytic thinkers like Nicholas Wolterstorff, William Abraham, John Hare, Richard Swinburne, Eleonore Stump, Robert Adams, and Marilyn McCord Adams. Not to mention MacIntyre! Though he probably belongs on here in terms of influence, a la Wittgenstein and Troeltsch and the Niebuhrs.

• Both Reno and Marshall converted to Catholicism after they earned their doctorates, unless I’m mistaken. Kilby has always been Catholic, I believe. Same for Cavanaugh. And Lash and Katongole. Am I missing any others? Hart is the only Orthodox theologian I spy.

• There needs to be an “influenced” line running from Troeltsch to Coakley.

• If the Boomers continue to sit on the academic throne, their most prominent successors, peers, and competitors are all Gen X. Which makes sense, given the trajectory of a scholar’s career: PhD in one’s 30s, emergence in one’s 40s, major contribution in one’s 50s. It seems that, as each generation comes out of doctoral programs, it takes about two decades for the field to sort itself. The upshot, from my vantage point, is that my own generation won’t know which of our peers will rise to the top for another 15 years or so.

• But that’s putting the cart before the horse. The real lesson I draw from this image, granting all its omissions and incompleteness, is how diffuse and disunified the “field” of Christian theology and ethics is today by comparison to the previous three generations. As Chuck Mathewes wrote a few years ago, in a review essay of Oliver O’Donovan’s career-capping trilogy in Christian ethics, the latter works should have been a “big event”—and yet they seemed to pass by without significant comment from (again) “the field.” Mathewes observes that this would not have happened in the 1970s and ’80s, when a few figures dominated the field and their publications and reviews invariably made a splash. What we have now is many fields, sometimes overlapping and sometimes not even touching, each and all of which make some claim to Christian theology and/or Christian ethics and/or philosophy of religion and/or religious epistemology and/or comparative religion and/or critical theory and/or etc., etc. That’s just the way it is today, for better or worse.

• Another thought: This is not a list of “the best” theological writers/thinkers over the last half century. One of my favorites, for example—Nicholas Healy—isn’t represented. I could always add him (he studied under Kathryn Tanner, I believe), just as many others could be added. But this web is using something of a “name-brand recognition” test. Quality and renown are not unrelated, but neither are they identical.

• I haven’t even mentioned that this set of interlocking genealogies doesn’t include (which it couldn’t) biblical scholars. Where would Brevard Childs or Stephen Fowl or Richard Hays or Ellen Davis fit, much less von Rad and other peers of and successors to Barth? Contrary to popular belief, historical critics read theologians and vice versa. The lines of influence just keep expanding…

• I’ve buried another lede. The unsurprising spider at the top of this web is Barth. The more surprising is Niebuhr—H. Richard, not Reinhold. Reinhold’s influence on twentieth century thought, including academic theology and ethics, was great and lasting. But H. Richard always had more theological influence (or so I think), and this map captures that nicely. Niebuhr the younger was an institutionalist, and there is a sense in which his legacy stretches longer and wider than his brother’s.

• I had forgotten just how prominent Gustafson was, both as a writer and as a Doktorvater, but wow, his students make for some impressive names in Christian ethics. I’m glad to see Ramsey, too, alongside Outka, who likewise had a hand in training a number of major figures. There’s a whole Princeton–Virginia thing going on here that should be mentioned alongside Yale–Chicago and Notre Dame–Duke.

• Hauerwas’s imprint on theology and ethics is probably not quite as evident from this genealogy as it should be … but then again, perhaps the proportion is good as is. From the early ’80s through the Iraq War, Hauerwas was hands down the Christian theologian, ethicist, and public intellectual on the American scene. His students flooded the job market. His books (and his students’) were everywhere, as were his big ideas—including downstream from the academy, in popular press and sermons and the like. Yet that omnipresence has subsided somewhat, certainly among scholars. Hauerwas is no longer the only game in town (not that he ever was; I’m talking felt impressions). Ethicists like Herdt and Bowlin and McKenny and Bretherton and Gregory and Mathewes and Tran (the last, Hauerwas’s student) all learned a thing or two from Hauerwas, but their project is not his. If Stout was worried twenty years ago about the American theological academy retreating into a Hauerwasian sectarian hideout, he can rest assured it hasn’t happened. In truth it was never going to happen. The worry was always overstated, even if it was responding to a real phenomenon.

• If I were a whiz with Adobe I would want to color code this map and create more complicated lines of relation. For example, Tanner and Volf have now been colleagues at Yale for more than a decade, and many students have had and continue to have both of them on their dissertation committee (I speak from experience!). Or think of McFarland and Jackson at Emory, or Stout and Gregory at Princeton, or Jones and Mathewes at UVA, so on and so forth. Sometimes an advisor is a hegemon; sometimes a committee is a genuine group effort. It would be useful, therefore, to be able to track who was colleagues with whom, and when, and for how long, and which students they co-advised or co-taught.

• I thought of another A+ theologian not on this list, akin to Healy: Paul DeHart, who studied under Tanner at Chicago and has taught at Vanderbilt for years.

• I don’t see anyone born in the 1980s (or later). Are Tran and Tonstad the lone “young guns” on this list? I imagine I’m overlooking or forgetting someone.

• Just as this image is not per se about quality, it also doesn’t give an accurate perception of a given theologian’s influence or readership simply through his or her writing. I’m thinking of Jenson, Webster, Volf, and Vanhoozer. A stranger to the guild would suppose them on the margins, either in terms of their training or in terms of their reception, when the truth is the opposite. The same goes for names I’ve already mentioned, like Willie Jennings, Paul Griffiths, and Delores Williams.

• Ah, I see that Bruce McCormack is not on here. He obviously fits, given Barth, Jüngel, Jenson, Hunsinger, Hector, et al.

• In one of his books criticizing the Jesus Seminar, Luke Timothy Johnson adds up the total number of doctoral programs represented by participants in the Seminar in order to show the lack of professional, disciplinary, and ideological diversity represented. Academic theology is no different. In one sense that’s perfectly fine: great programs house great teachers who train great students. But it’s important to remember just how small and incestuous this world is. And thus it’s good to get outside of it once in a while. And to listen to voices who never belonged to it. The autodidacts and polymaths and fundies have a thing or two to teach elites, easy though it is to forget that.

• I said the world portrayed on this map has fractured and split and multiplied. Is it also dying? The reputational prestige of liberal mainline theology and its institutions was always a corollary of the numerical quantity, sociopolitical influence, and sheer existence of liberal mainline churches. But as those have died off or entered hospice care, what of their institutions, their seminaries, their endowed chairs, their theological scholars? We’re living in the midst of a shift. The money is still there. Does the funding have a constituency? Do these institutions create a new constituency out of whole cloth? Or is their waning, absorption, and disappearance a fait accompli? I think we’re about to see. Two or three generations from now we’ll know the answers to those questions.

• I’m going to need someone to make similar versions of this web for Catholic theologians (centered on Notre Dame?) as well as adjacent fields like patristics and biblical studies and analytic philosophy. I lack the knowledge and time. But it would be fascinating to see them, not to mention to see if someone could somehow combine them with one another and with this image. Perhaps an interactive 3-D model housed online? Get on it, youngsters!

• I had one last thing to add—a bright clear thought in my mind, something significant—but it vanished when I came to a new bullet point. I’ll update this post if I remember. For now I welcome any and all thoughts, additions, corrections, and other feedback. Send it my way or Shelton’s. He’s the instigator and author here. I’m just using his work to think out loud. Kudos to him for some stimulating off-hours labor, just for fun.

Updates:

• Vincent Lloyd. Another name that should be added. Turns out there’s a whole Union thing going on, too…

• I remembered the comment that slipped my mind. In my imaginary color-coded update, figures would be denominated not only by their institutions, colleagues, teachers, and students, but by the nature of their contributions. In other words, everyone on this map has made some sort of scholarly contribution. Not everyone, though, has ventured into the world of magazines, essays, podcasts, and public speaking. Not everyone, that is, writes for a popular audience or attempts the “public intellectual” thing. But some of them do. Some of them, perhaps, do as much of that as they do the academic thing; occasionally some do more of the one than of the other. It’s a delicate balancing act, after all. You could even mark the careers of some as a kind of “before” and “after.” Think of Tony Judt, as an example outside the guild. He became a public intellectual after his major contributions added up to something so impressive the editors and readers of (e.g.) the NYRB and NYT had to sit up and pay attention. He began to write for them, and all of a sudden his scholarship had a “public.” I’m wondering the same thing about some of the folks on this micro-genealogy.

2022: reading

On its own terms, it was a solid year for reading. In terms of my goals, however, not so much. What with health, travel, and professional matters hoovering up all my attention from July to December, my reading plummeted in the second half of 2022. Last year I wrote about how, for years, I’d been stuck in the 90-110 zone for books read annually. Last year I climbed to 120. This year I hoped to reach 150. Alas, by the time Sunday rolls around I’ll have read 122 this year. At least I didn’t regress.

The environmental goals I made, I kept: namely, to cut down TV even more; to stick to audiobooks over podcasts; and to leaven scholarly theology with novels, nonfiction, poetry, and audiobooks. I make these goals, not because I value quantity over quality, nor because I want to read faster or just read a bunch of smaller books. It’s because setting these goals pushes me to set aside much less worthy uses of my time in order to focus on what is better for me and what I genuinely prefer. Both the direct effects (more reading) and the knock-on effects (less TV, less phone and laptop, less wasted time on mindless or mind-sucking activities) are what I’m after. And, as I’ve written before, I didn’t grow up reading novels. Which means I’m always playing catch-up.

My aspirational monthly goal is 2-3 novels, 2-3 volumes of poetry, 2-3 audiobooks, 3-4 nonfiction works, 4-8 works of academic theology. That alone should push me to the 140-160 range. I was on pace heading into August this year, then cratered. As 2023 approaches, I won’t make 150 my “realistic” goal; I’ll set it at 135. But one of my brothers as well as another friend both hit 200 this past year, which puts me to shame. So perhaps a little friendly competition will do the job.

In any case, what follows is a list of my favorite books I read this year. Two new books I was disappointed in: Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom and The Ink Black Heart, the sixth entry in J. K. Rowling’s Cormoran Strike series. I won’t write about the latter, but I might find time for the former. I also read J. G. Ballard’s Crash for the first time, a hateful experience. I “get” it. But getting it doesn’t make the reading pleasant, or even justify the quality of the book. I do plan to write about that one.

Here are the ones I did like, with intermittent commentary.

*

Rereads

5. Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time.

4. G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man. Hadn’t picked this one up in 22 years. Magnificent.

3. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters. I’m willing to call this a perfect book. I should probably read it every year for the rest of my life. Lewis really is a moral anatomist nonpareil.

2. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451. Hadn’t read this one since middle school. Had completely forgotten about the technologies Bradbury conjured up as substitutes for reading—the very technologies (influencers live-streaming the manipulated melodrama of their own lives into ordinary people’s homes via wall-to-wall screens) we have used to the same end.

1. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. I could not remember when or whether I’d read this years and years ago, but I listened to Forest Whitaker’s rendition on Spotify and it was excellent. Highly recommended. (The audio recording; I know Douglass himself doesn’t need my stamp of approval.)

Poetry

I won’t pretend to have read as much poetry as I have in previous years. I finishing rereading R. S. Thomas’s poems; I got to a couple more collections by Denise Levertov; and I read Malcolm Guite’s The Singing Bowl, my first of his volumes. I’m hoping to get back into more poetry in the new year.

Fiction

10. William Goldman, The Princess Bride. Never knew Goldman wrote it as a book before it became a screenplay and a film. A delight.

9. John Le Carré, Silverview. A fitting send-off to the master.

8. Ian Fleming, Casino Royale. Brutality with flair. I wasn’t prepared for how good the prose, the plotting, the thematic subtext would all be. I wonder what would happen if, in the next film adaptation, they actually committed to adapting the character rather than a sanitized version of him. I’m not recommending that: Bond is wicked, and the Connery films valorized his wickedness. But the books commit to the bit, and it makes them a startling read some 70 years later.

7. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan. The second entry in the Earthsea saga. I expect to read the rest this year.

6. Walter Mosley, Trouble is What I Do. My second Mosley. Someone adapt this, please! Before picking it up, I had just finished a brand new novel celebrated by the literary establishment, a novel that contains not one interesting idea, much less an interesting sentence. Whereas Mosley is incapable of writing uninteresting sentences. He’s got more style in his pinky finger than most writers have in their whole bodies.

5. Mick Herron, Slow Horses & Dead Lions. I got hooked, before watching the series. Casting Oldman as Jackson Lamb, he who also played Smiley on film, is inspired. I expect to finish the whole series by summer. Herron isn’t as good as Le Carré—who is?—but his ability to write twisty plots in punchy prose that intersects politics without getting preachy: that’s a winning ticket.

4. Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House. My first Jackson. As good as advertised. Read it with some guys in a book club, and one friend had a theory that another friend who’d read the novel a dozen times had never considered. I’m still thinking about it.

3. Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz. Wrote about it here.

2. Brian Moore, The Statement. I’ve never read anything like this novel. It floored me. James and Le Carré are my two genre masters, each of whose corpus I will complete sometime in my life. Moore may now be on the list, not least owing to his genre flexibility. I’ve read Catholics. I just grabbed Black Robe. Thanks to John Wilson for the recommendation.

1. P. D. James, The Children of Men. I’m an evangelist for this one. Don’t get me started. Just marvel, with me, that a lifelong mystery writer—who didn’t publish her first novel till age 40—found it within herself, in her 70s, to write a hyper-prescient work of dystopian fiction on a par with Huxley, Orwell, Ballard, Bradbury, and Chesterton. I would also add Atwood, since this novel is so clearly a Christian response to The Handmaid’s Tale. As ever, all hail the Queen.

Nonfiction

10. A bunch of books about liberalism, neoliberalism, and the right: Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society; Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism; Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal; Francis Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents; Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture; Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order; Mark Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind; Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences; Matthew Continetti, The Right.

9. John Pfaff, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform. Outstanding. Hat tip to Matthew Lee Anderson for the recommendation.

8. Christopher Hitchens, A Hitch in Time. A pleasure to dip back in to some of Hitch’s best work. But also a reminder, with time and distance, of some of his less pleasant vices.

7. James Mumford, Vexed & Yuval Levin, A Time to Build. Imagining life beyond tribalism, neither pessimistic nor optimistic. Just hopeful.

6. Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks & Phil Christman, How to Be Normal. I wrote about Burkeman here. Christman is a mensch. Read both, ideally together.

5. Wilfred M. McClay, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story & Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War.

4. Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel.

3. Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.

2. Wendell Berry, The Art of Loading Brush. He’s still got it. There are a couple essays here that rank among Berry’s best.

1. Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope. The best book of any kind I read in 2022. One of the best books I’ve ever read. A one of one. On a par with After Virtue, A Secular Age, and other magisterial table-setters. Except this one is half the size and happens to focus on Plenty Coups, the Crow, and the moral and philosophical grounds for continuing to live in the face of reasonable despair. Take and read.

Christian (popular)

8. John Piper, Don’t Waste Your Life. Hand on heart, I’d never read a Piper book in my life. I wanted something short and punchy on audio, and this fit the bill. Turns out the man can preach.

7. John Mark Comer, Love-ology & The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry & Live No Lies. Hopped on the JMC train this year, since all of my students and many of my friends love his books. He’s doing good work. Pair him with Sayers, Crouch, Wilson, and Dane Ortlund, plus the younger gents at the intersection of Mere O, Davenent, and Theopolis—Meador, Loftus, Anderson, Roberts, Littlejohn, et al—and if you squint a bit, you can see the emerging writers, leaders, and intellectuals of a sane American evangelicalism, should that strange and unruly beast have a future. And if it doesn’t, they’re the ones who will be there on the other side.

6. Ronald Rolheiser, Domestic Monastery. Simply lovely.

5. Mark Sayers, Disappearing Church. Shrewd, lucid diagnosis. Not so sure about the prescription.

4. Andy Crouch, The Life We’re Looking For. Click on the “Andy Crouch” tag on this blog and you’ll see tens of thousands of words spilled over this book as well as Andy’s larger project. A wonderful man, a great writer, a gift to Christian attempts to think and live wisely today.

3. Kate Bowler, Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved. I listened to this one on audio. I wept.

2. Andrew Wilson, Spirit and Sacrament. Just what the doctor ordered for my students.

1. Abigail Favale, The Genesis of Gender. The unrivaled summer beach read of 2022. No joke, I was at the beach in July and looked to my right and then to my left and saw more than one person reading it. You heard it here first.

Theology (newer)

15. Some books on Christian ethics: A Guide for the Perplexed (by Victor Lee Austin), A Brief History (by Michael Banner), A Very Short Introduction (by D. Stephen Long).

14. Myles Werntz, A Field Guide to Christian Nonviolence & From Isolation to Community. Two accessible entries from a friend on Christian pacifism and Christian community. Nab copies of both today!

13. Charlie Trimm, The Destruction of the Canaanites. See my review in Christianity Today.

12. David Bentley Hart, Tradition and Apocalypse & You Are Gods.

11. Victor Lee Austin, Friendship: The Heart of Being Human. Victor makes a case that friendship is not just the heart of being human, but the heart of the gospel; or rather, the latter because the former; or vice versa.

10. Fred Sanders, Fountain of Salvation. See my forthcoming review in Pro Ecclesia.

9. Edwin Chr. van Driel, Rethinking Paul. See my review in Modern Theology.

8. Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, The Love That is God. This one will be on a syllabus very soon.

7. R. B. Jamieson and Tyler Wittman, Biblical Reasoning. See my forthcoming review in International Journal of Systematic Theology.

6. William G. Witt, Icons of Christ: A Biblical and Systematic Theology for Women’s Ordination. So far as I can see, immediately the standard work on the question. I’d love to see some good-faith engagements from the other side, both Protestant and Catholic.

5. John M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift & Paul and the Power of Grace.

4. Christopher Bryan, The Resurrection of the Messiah. Historical, textual, linguistic, literary, and theological scholarship at its finest.

3. Mark Kinzer, Searching Her Own Mystery. I learned a lot from this book. I try to read everything Kinzer writes on the topic of Israel, church, and messianic Judaism. Even better something focused on a particular text, in this case Nostra Aetate.

2. Adam Neder, Theology as a Way of Life. Pellucid and compelling. A beautiful vision that captures heart and mind both. Here’s a taste.

1. Jonathan Bernier, Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament. What can I say? I have a thing for contrarian dating of the NT. I’m not at all persuaded by the consensus dating of most first-century Christian writings. Bernier updates John A. T. Robinson’s classic Redating the New Testament, with a clearly enunciated methodology deployed in calm, measured arguments that avoid even a hint of polemic. For that very reason, an invigorating read.

Theology (older)

6. A Reformation Debate: The Letters of Bishop Sadoleto and John Calvin. (Whispers: Calvin doesn’t win this round.)

5. Papal social encyclicals: Veritatis Splendor, Evangelium Vitae, Humanae Vitae, & Lumen Gentium. Always worth a re-read.

4. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God & Homilies in Praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Beautiful, devotional, exemplary models of spiritual theology.

3. St. Cyprian of Carthage, On the Church: Select Treatises & On the Church: Select Letters.

2. St. Basil the Great, On Social Justice. Blows your hair back then lights it on fire.

1. Michael Ramsey, The Gospel and the Catholic Church. Is Ramsey the most underrated Anglophone theologian of the twentieth century? The man had exquisite theological sense; he wrote with style and passion; he cared about the unity of the church; he was a bona fide scholar; he wrote about everything; he became Archbishop of Canterbury; what’s not to love? Both this work and his little volume on the resurrection are classics.

Expertise

Expertise is under attack is a common theme in journalism and academic writing today. I don’t doubt it, and I don’t doubt its importance. Expertise is real and the loss of public confidence in persons whose office, education, training, or experience have historically granted them some measure of authority is an all too real problem. Implicit distrust of the very notion of authority, the very suggestion of expertise, makes a common life impossible, in more ways than one.

But there is a fundamental misunderstanding in defenses of expertise, and not only in high-minded venues. Even at the ordinary level of daily life or—where I spend my days—in the academy and the classroom, there is a basic confusion regarding what expertise is, what credentials are, and how either ought to function in social relations.

I wrote about this at length in my essay for The New Atlantis a year ago, titled “Statistics as Storytelling.” I won’t rehash that argument here. Let me do my best to boil it down into its basic components. I’ll spell it out in six principles.

The first principle of expertise is a defined scope of competence. An “expert”—if I’m honest, I hate that term; it’s a weasel word, invariably used to enhance status or dismiss objections; but I’ll keep using it here, since it’s the one in circulation—possesses some relevant knowledge about a particular domain: embryology, archeology, Greek sculpture, Moby-Dick. If the Melville scholar comments on anything outside her expertise, therefore, she is by definition no longer an expert, and thus bears no authority worthy of deference or respect. This is the Richard Dawkins phenomenon: He is welcome to speak and to write about philosophy and theology, but he does not do so as a philosopher or theologian, but as an evolutionary biologist addressing questions and subjects outside the scope of his formal training.

The second principle of expertise is that, without exception, all members of the same field, whether delimited by discipline or study or practice or training, disagree with one another about matters crucial to the field to which they belong. Expertise, in other words, is not about unanimity or agreement; it is about membership in a group defined by disagreement and disputation. It is about being party to the contest that is the field; being part of the argument that constitutes the guild. Expertise is not consensus: it’s the very opposite. It’s the entry point into a world of bitter, sometimes rancorous, conflict.

That doesn’t mean that everything is thereby in question. One must agree about certain things to disagree about others. Intelligible disagreement presupposes prior agreement. 2 + 2 = 4 is a premise for mathematicians’ arguments; certain claims build on others. That’s true of every realm of knowledge. But the interesting thing is always what’s not agreed upon. And outsiders are always surprised by just how little is agreed upon, even by like-minded experts in the same field.

The third principle of expertise is that, whenever and wherever what is called for in a given moment or in response to a certain question is not a set of empirical facts but a judgment, then the presumptive force of expertise is immediately qualified. There is no such thing as expertise in judgment. Or rather, there is, but one cannot be credentialed in it, for its name is wisdom. Wisdom is not and cannot be the result of formal education. It does not come with a degree or diploma. There are no letters to append to your name that signify wisdom. The least learned or educated person in the world may be wise, and the smartest or most educated person in the world may be foolish. (Indeed, Christians say that’s the normal run of things.) Good sense comes from living. Prudence is a virtue. Neither is the domain of an expert. There are no experts in good judgment, in wisdom, in prudence. As often as not, expertise functions as an obstacle to it, or a shield from it.

The fourth principle of expertise, then, is that typically what expertise provides is a set of facts or conditions, sometimes necessary but never sufficient, for the possibility of exercising wise judgment. It is true that I know more about Christian theology than most believers in the pews. That does not, in any way, mean that I am more likely to be right than they are about this or that Christian doctrine. A monk of Mount Athos is far wiser to submit to Orthodox tradition than to listen to me, even if I’ve read more Orthodox theologians than he has. A lifelong elderly believer who has never read theology may have keener insight into the mystery of the Eucharist than I do. True, I know the date of the second Ecumenical Council, and she may not. That’s not at issue though. What’s at issue is whether my expertise, such as it is, is either necessary or sufficient for knowing sound doctrine. And it is not. (If you’d like to meet a passel of heretical PhDs in theology, I can arrange an introduction.)

The same goes for biblical scholars. Knowledge of Greek gives you a leg up on having some plausible sense of what St. Paul might have had in mind in the mid-50s, writing to Corinth. But it doesn’t ensure that your exegesis of any New Testament text will be right, or even more likely to be right than the exegesis of an ordinary believer in the pew, ignorant of Greek as well as first-century Greco-Roman culture. Why? First, because New Testament scholars themselves don’t agree about how to read the text. The Pauline guild is that group of experts than which there is no more cantankerous or quarrelsome. Second, because the New Testament is Holy Scripture, and what God has kept from the learned he has revealed to the simple. That is, what God has to say in and through the canon may just as well bypass the intricacies of academic method as be accessed by them. In my experience, that is often the case.

The fifth principle of expertise is that all fields or domains that presuppose or assert normative (rather than empirical) claims logically may and necessarily will come into conflict. This is usually most quickly revealed in anthropology. An economist supposes homo sapiens to be a utility-maximizer, say, while the therapist sees a self-actualizer, and the theologian a sinner in need of Christ. To be sure, some aspects of these visions might be harmonious. But not all. Each, for example, takes a different and mutually opposed view of desire. Are all desires good? Are all to be affirmed or fulfilled? Is desire as such self-validating? And so on. The theologian is not departing from her realm in contesting the claims of the economist or the therapist, for the ground being contested is common to the three of them. It concerns the nature and purpose of the human person. Hence, when areas of expertise overlap, it is wholly proper for argument to ensue. No one’s view is invalidated in advance by dint of lacking the relevant credentials.

The sixth principle of expertise is that sometimes experts are wrong. It may be some group of experts, or all of them. The error may be partial or complete. But experts are wrong, and in fact, regularly so. That is to be expected, since there are no angelic experts, only human ones. The practice of knowledge is just that: a practice, and so subject to all the ordinary human foibles: vanity, greed, oversight, shortsightedness, limitations of every kind, fallibility, haste, contempt, and the rest. Sometimes we want something to be true when it isn’t. Sometimes we wish something were good when it isn’t. Sometimes we can’t stand the thought that our enemy isn’t wrong, and we work overtime to show that he is, or might be. Sometimes our blinders—the products of inheritance, culture, genetics, generation, education, prejudice, peers, parents, friends, what have you—keep us from seeing what is right in front of our noses. Whatever the reason, experts are far from infallible. The one thing you can take to the bank is that every expert in every field at this present moment believes something profoundly wrong or untrue in relation to his or her field, not to mention other fields. That includes me. The problem is just that none of us knows which one of our beliefs is the wrong one, amid all the right ones.

For experts of all kinds, the upshot should be a severe and sincere humility about the range and competence of our knowledge. For normal folks, such humility should be the expectation of experts, not the exception; and when it isn’t present, they are not wrong to be skeptical.

The vanity of theologians

The love of God in Christ is the model of all good theological work. That is Barth's basic thesis: “If the object of theological knowledge is Jesus Christ and, in him, perfect love, then Agape alone can be the dominant and formative prototype and principle of theology.” Yet who among us would claim to consistently meet this standard? It is one thing to agree that teaching ought to be an act of self-emptying love on behalf of students, but quite another to teach that way. And while each of us falls short of this ideal in our own ways, Barth draws our attention to an especially corrosive vice that commonly infects us. The illness presents as, among other things, an excessive concern for our reputations; a morbid craving for praise; a narcissistic pretentiousness combined with insecurity; a relentless desire to outdo our colleagues and to broadcast our accomplishments; a loveless envy when others succeed; and a gloomy anxiety about our legacies, about how people will remember and evaluate us when we're dead. The vice, of course, is vanity, and Barth considers it a menacing threat to theologians.

To put it simply, Barth thinks a vain theologian is an embodied contradiction of the gospel and the very antithesis of Jesus Christ himself. And he doesn't care how obvious this is. Barth doesn't care that making fun of self-important theologians is by now a tired cliché. He knows that vanity disables us, and because of that he is willing to sound the alarm. And we would do well not to evade his critique by dismissing it as moralistic or judgmental or whatever. . . .

It is tempting to interpret passages like these as nothing more than Barth's way of deflecting the ocean of praise that was being directed at him toward the end of his life. He was, after all, the most famous theologian in the world. When he traveled to America to give the first five lectures in Evangelical Theology, Time magazine put him on its cover. Or perhaps one sees in these statements a tacit admission that Barth did not always manage to live up to his own standards, and that is certainly true. But Barth is aiming these passages at us too, and only an instinct for self-protection would lead us to think otherwise. Because if he wasn't troubled by our desire for greatness, he wouldn't aggressively remind us that we are nothing more than “little theologians.” He wouldn't criticize us for being more interested in the question “Who is the greatest among us?” than we are in the “plain and modest question about the matter at hand.” If he wasn't worried about the way we inflate ourselves by demeaning our rivals, he wouldn't ask why there are “so many really woeful theologians who go around with faces that are eternally troubled or even embittered, always in a rush to bring forward their critical reservations and negations?” And he wouldn't keep reminding us that evangelical theology is modest theology if he wasn't distressed by our immodesty—by the serenely confident way we make definitive pronouncements, even as we theoretically agree that all theological speech is limited and subject to revision. You don't write passages like the ones in this book unless you are concerned by how easily theologians confuse zealous pursuit of the truth with zealous pursuit of their own glory. It would not be far off to say that Barth's examination of this theme is something like a gloss on Jesus’s claim that you cannot simultaneously work for praise from God and praise from people. You can seek one or the other, but not both.

It is important to see that Barth is not taking cheap shots at theologians here. Yes, he is giving us strong medicine, but he is giving it to us because he thinks vanity turns us into the kind of people whose lives obscure the truth people who make the gospel less rather than more plausible. We cannot, of course, make the gospel less true. God is God, and the truth is the truth, and nothing we do can change that. But Barth understands the role that the existence of the community plays in both the perception and concealment of truth. “The community does not speak with words alone,” he writes. “It speaks by the very fact of its existence in the world.” There's what we say, and then there's who we are, and who we are says something.

And the connection with teaching is obvious. We believe that God sometimes uses flawed and sinful people like ourselves to make himself known. Since those are the only kind of people there are, those are the kind God uses. But how compelling could it possibly be for our students to hear us say, for example, that the Christian life is a life of self-giving that conforms to Jesus Christ's own life, or that the church lives to point away from itself to its Lord, when at the same time they see us carefully managing our CVs, ambitiously seeking acclaim and advancement, and morbidly competing with one another in exactly the same cutthroat ways that people in every academic discipline compete with one another? It doesn't add up. Arcade Fire is right: it’s absurd to trust a millionaire quoting the Sermon on the Mount. And it’s no less absurd for students to trust vain theologians when they talk about a crucified God. 

I know this is not everyone's problem. Some readers don't need to hear this. They struggle with other vices. But anyone who has read the Gospels knows that Jesus goes out of his way to address this problem. Speaking specifically about teachers, he says, “They do all their deeds to be seen by others. . . . They love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats . . . and to be greeted with respect . . . and to have people call them [teacher]. . . . [But] the greatest among you will be your servant. All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted” (Matt. 23:1–12). In Luke 14 Jesus tells his disciples that following him requires giving up their possessions, and for many of us, the possession we covet most, the thing we cling to like greedy misers, is our reputation.

—Adam Neder, Theology as a Way of Life: On Teaching and Learning the Christian Faith (Baker Academic, 2019), 64-70

Perennial epigraph

Plaster this as the epigraph or foreword to every work of theology, every essay, every review, every lecture, every class, every tract, every sermon, every degree in doctrine or ministry or biblical studies. It comes from the opening chapter of Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ:

Quid prodest tibi alta de Trinitate disputare, si careas humilitate unde displiceas Trinitati? Vere alta verba non faciunt sanctum et justum, sed virtuosa vita efficit Deo carum. Opto magis sentire compunctionem quam scire definitionem. Si scires totam Bibliam, et omnium philosophorum dicta quid totum prodesset, sine charitate et gratia? Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas præter amare Deum et illi soli fervire. Ista est summa sapientia per contemptum mundi tendere ad regna cælestia.

Be the teacher

It’s an old line: When asked about the experience of teaching, a teacher replies that he learned more from the students than they learned from him. One can understand the impulse, and why the answer endures as a kind of proverb or cliché: it’s an expression of humility; it resists the impression of the master dispensing Knowledge from on high; it conjures a classroom in which student and teacher collaborate together in the search for knowledge; it appeals to our democratic sensibilities; it might even tickle our know-nothing instincts, dormant though they may be. In truth, the answer might be little more than a deflection. What teacher wants to say outright, “Yes, I’m a fantastic and knowledgeable teachers and my students are lucky to have me”?

Nevertheless. I want to call bunk on this nonsensical and finally destructive reflex.

To begin, it is usually (not always) a false modesty and thus a false humility on display. No teacher worth her salt really believes her students have more to teach her than vice versa. If that were true she wouldn’t be a teacher in the first place. It would amount to vocational malpractice. You are a teacher because you have something to teach. If you don’t, then you should probably consider another profession.

Moreover, such a view misunderstands the nature of the student. The student is not already equipped, albeit awaiting something like activation. The student is a learner, and a learner needs to learn. The teacher is both the facilitator and the source of that learning. The teacher possesses something the student lacks, and it is her special privilege to help the student to come into possession of it, too. In that way there is an egalitarian element to teaching: what one communicates is not thereby lost; when you teach me and I learn, we both have knowledge that, before, you had and I did not. That is one of the beauties of teaching and learning, namely that there is no competition intrinsic to it. You and I can both know X equally and fully, and neither suffers as a result. It’s zero sum.

But precisely because knowledge is a shared or common good in this sense, when one lacks it he really lacks it. The relationship between a teacher and a student, then, is not equal from the start. It is unequal. That is what makes the teacher a teacher and the student a student. “Inequality” here has nothing to do with worth or value; nor does it have to do with everything that might count for knowledge, only with the particular type or range of knowledge in question. I have a friend who builds energy-efficient homes from scratch. In the realm of building energy-efficient homes, he is the master and I am the apprentice. (Better: I’m a flat zero.) The roles are reversed in the realm of theology. If we were to suppose otherwise, it would be sheer pretense.

Imagine a chemistry class in which the teacher claimed to learn more from the students than she taught them. Is such a claim even intelligible? Perhaps, at a stretch, there is an equivocation here: she means to say that she has learned about some other matter—life, or the resilience of this generation of students, or the lovely array of diverse backgrounds and cultures represented in the classroom. That’s as may be, but it’s not germane to the point. For she is a chemistry teacher. She teaches chemistry to students who need to learn it. That there are other or additional exchanges of various forms of knowledge happening alongside the chemistry-teaching is at once a happy fact and irrelevant to the question of whether she, the teacher, is teaching them, the students, the subject of which she is an expert. If she isn’t, we’ve got a problem.

I detect at least two anxieties here. One is a fear of authority, wedded to or underwritten by doubt about expertise. We wonder whether expertise really exists (does that imply some people are smarter than others? that some are better educated than others? than some simply know more than others, and always will?), but even if it does exist, we doubt whether it can be wielded with authority in a way that avoids abuse. For if abuse is endemic to the exercise of authority, better to deny or abolish the latter than to provide unwitting cover for the former.

The second anxiety belongs to the humanities. That is to say, most of us would admit that a chemist or a geologist or an epidemiologist(!) knows his stuff, and the stuff he knows is stuff we don’t. But for academics outside the STEM fields, there is a widespread suspicion—a simmering low-grade feeling—that what we trade in is not so much knowledge as it is, well, opinions and ideas clothed in jargon. So that, in a strong sense, we don’t have anything to teach our students. In which case they have as much to teach us as we them. After all, if it’s contested readings all the way down, who’s to say they won’t propose a reading as good as, or better than, ours?

I’m not an English professor, so I won’t comment on why language and literature should see itself as a true disciplina or Wissenschaft akin to biology or mathematics. My minimal point is that, even in those disciplines that most explicitly and critically practice and foster the arts of interpretation (and, spoiler, no human inquiry, however empirical, is exempt from these arts), the teacher has something to hand on to her students, and she should do so with gusto. If she had nothing, she could not and would not be a teacher. As it stands, she does and she is, and so her posture should be one of confident authority, not false modesty. Students learn when we know what we are doing and do it without apology. They do not learn when we pretend to lack what they so desperately need.

I sometimes wonder whether the abdication of pedagogical authority is rooted in a false diagnosis of “students these days.” As though they already know what they need to know; or, if they do not, then their exquisitely sensitive egos can’t stand the suggestion that they need to learn what they don’t know. Neither is true, at least in my experience. My students don’t think they know everything already. Almost to a person, they are eager to admit how little they know, and how much they want to learn. That doesn’t mean they simply take my word for it (nor should they). But no one’s egos are being bruised when I teach them as one whose training has prepared him to teach theology with some measure of authority (an authority that is relative in more than one respect: relative to their other courses in theological subjects; relative to their courses in other disciplines; relative to the teachings of the church; relative to the testimony of Holy Scripture; relative, ultimately, to God, the source of all knowledge and the supreme authority). On the contrary, my students lean forward in their seats. They see from my own passion for the material, first, that this thing matters; second, that it is substantial, hefty, neither thin gruel nor small beer; and third, that it is therefore worth desiring for its own sake. It stands apart both from them and from me: it’s the thing I keep pointing toward, gesturing at, like the finger of the Baptist. It’s real, it’s good, and it’s worth knowing—precisely because they only barely glimpse it, at least at first.

That’s the magic. That’s what can happen when you’re in the classroom and you’ve got something to teach folks who are ready to learn. Be the teacher, and the rest falls into place.

No fads, please

Writing about angels last week, I had in mind not just garden-variety demythologizers but specifically the sort of MDiv-in-hand pastor who reports having “matured” or “evolved” beyond the simple pieties of his upbringing, his denomination, or his own flock. In my experience, nine times out of ten this maturation or evolution, falsely so called, is not the result of actual wide reading in the church’s tradition but rather a function of moving up in the world, as a matter of education, class, or status. That is to say, it’s the product of peer pressure. “Believing in angels” comes to be seen as the sort of thing unenlightened persons do, and so you, the two-semesters-in seminarian, drop it like a bad habit. That’s not the sort of thing “we” go in for around here, you know. At most, the banished belief comes after a rough skim of half an assigned textbook—not exactly drinking broadly and deeply from the wellspring of the church’s wisdom down the ages.

This phenomenon reminded me of a pet peeve of mine. The sort of pastors I have in mind—and I want to be clear that they are far from all, perhaps not even a majority of, church leaders—fall hard for theological fads. They’re all in for the latest thing, whatever that thing may be. Sometimes it’s a thinker: Barth, Bultmann, Moltmann, Spong, Brueggemann, Hauerwas, Jenson, Milbank, Tanner, Wright, Coakley, Boyd, Zahnd, Sonderegger, whoever. Sometimes it’s a buzzword: story, Christus Victor, virtue, passibility, “being missional,” “being incarnational,” intentional community, new creation, postcolonialism, sacramentalism, natural law, classical theism, and the like. Whatever or whoever it is, it’s where the action is. And if you hear the name or catchphrase once you hear it a thousand times: it’s the lodestar, the church’s true north, the siren song of the contemporary minister.

Don’t get me wrong: some of these ideas, many of these thinkers, are well worth the attention. Fads are rarely fads for no reason. And like everyone else, I’ve been susceptible myself to the temptation to thinking that she or he or it is the Big New Thing, the Solution to All Our Problems.

Here’s where things get off track.

First, theological fads are a puff of smoke. To say they are ephemeral would be a slight to ephemerality. Blink and you miss them. Marry one of them (as the saying goes) and you’ll be a widow before you make it back down the aisle.

Second, it’s difficult to over-emphasize the belated character of theological fads. Such fads usually originate overseas, in Germany or France or Great Britain, sometimes here in the States at an elite R1 university. Often enough their true paternity lies in another discipline: philosophy, critical theory, sociology, anthropology. In any case, once it’s been disseminated to second- and third-tier universities and thence to seminaries, it’s already passé. But it hasn’t even reached pastors at this point. Whether they hear about it in school or from a trade book or via a blog (these days, I suppose, replace “blog” with “Twitter”), the hip new thing that’s blowing their minds is likely decades old. It’s so far downstream from its true origin that the traces of its parentage are minimal at best. But the way the plebeian pastors talk about it, it was born yesterday.

Now, is this their fault? No, at least not for the most part. How are they supposed to know better? Presumably they imbibed the now-defunct fad from a professor or a mentor or a conference or a trusted writer. This is the way new ideas and perspectives get distributed in society ordinarily, as a matter of course. There’s no way around that.

No, the problem isn’t the pastors themselves. The problem is the cult of the new. In particular, the problem is the cult of the new in the realm of faith, ministry, and theology.

Whatever the cause—be it capitalism, the nature of the research university, mass culture, all of the above—ministers are trained to suppose that the answers to their questions, the reservoir of resources to support their lives of service to the church, are sure to be found in living writers and thinkers who are producing “original” and “cutting-edge” work. If a pastoral or theological author pens an idea, the extent to which it is innovative is the extent to which it is likely to be good, true, or (most of all) relevant. Put differently, the degree to which it presents itself as a departure from, or in contrast to, what came before is just the degree to which it can be trusted.

Needless to say, this is a bad way to think about either ministry or the gospel.

There are many reasons why this is the case. For one, it invariably implies, or actively encourages, what Ratzinger famously termed “a hermeneutic of rupture.” What we believe now is by definition not what they believed then. But this is trapdoor thinking. To set up Our Truth Today as the arbiter of what we may be received from the past and (thus) as a far-reaching dissent from forebears in the faith is both short-sighted and self-defeating. It’s a fool’s game. After a while believers will begin asking themselves what, after all, they have in common with the church that came between Jesus and themselves. As the answer approaches “little to nothing,” people will naturally start to wonder why they’re a part of this thing in the first place. If that’s the problem looking toward the past, there’s another problem looking toward the future. For “innovative rupture” (à la creative destruction) thinking simultaneously sets you, the vanguard of enlightened opinion, up for obsolescence and replacement. For there is no reason in principle to suppose that either you or your views are the end of theological history. A successor awaits. There’s always one just out of sight, lurking in the shadows. You and your big ideas have nowhere to go but the proverbial dustbin of history.

Beyond the merits, considered at a purely social level, there’s a sort of embarrassment involved in making “not being behind the times” a measure of theological or pastoral wisdom. Think back to angels. It’s true that in the 19th and 20th centuries it was a sign of liberal learning and upper-class status to roll one’s eyes at “mythological” belief in “literal” spiritual beings. (We’ve gotten past all that, haven’t we?) But guess what? That’s no longer the case. At least in elite theological circles, it’s perfectly typical to affirm a populated celestial reality; in some circles, the weirder the better. The same goes for miracles. The air one breathes in Anglophone theological writing circa 2000–2020 is strikingly different than, say, the years 1965–1985. But that shift at the elite level takes a while to trickle down to normal folks. Which means that you’ve got pastors going about their daily lives whose deepest desire is for others to know that they know how silly it is to believe, for example, in angels or miracles, when the ultimate “others” they want to impress—in this case, by proxy—are in fact no longer impressed by such posturing. It’s pure fashion, and pastors are never in style.

The lesson should be clear: avoid theological fads like the plague. That doesn’t mean avoid contemporary writing. Nor does it mean new ideas are always bad. Rather, it means, on the one hand, that pastors (and Christians in general) should not treat faith as a matter of “up-to-date-ness.” Doctrine is not set by the clock. Theology is not fashion. The church is indeed meant to grow in knowledge across time, and the church’s mission means that it will always and of necessity encounter and engage and respond to new questions, challenges, and ideas. The church did not have standing teaching on nuclear weapons or IVF or cloning or CRISPR or extraterrestrial life or climate change until those technologies and eventualities appeared on the (social, conceptual, political) scene. Nevertheless, the terms of the church’s teaching are set by the gospel, and the gospel is itself one and the same as the announcement made by the apostles in the first generation. It is that gospel—the faith once for all delivered to the saints—that at once norms and generates whatever the church has to say anew in the present day.

On the other hand, what resistance to fads entails, positively speaking, is a certain emphasis or approach to learning and rooting oneself in the meaning of the faith. The best antidote to the cult of the new is devotion to the old. If you want to be inoculated against theological fads that appear today and vanish tomorrow, then dedicate yourself to the lifelong task of mastering (not that you can master) sacred tradition in all its breadth and depth. Read Christian texts from every century of the church’s existence. Read Christian texts from every region and locale and culture where the church has been planted. Read multiple texts by every one of the doctores ecclesiae (to which venerable list St. Irenaeus will be added soon!). Read church fathers and medievals, reformers and moderns and postmoderns. Read mystics and missionaries, monks and ministers, bishops and beggars, evangelists and academics. Read Catholics and Orthodox, Anglicans and Anabaptists, Methodists and Moravians, Calvinists and Campbellites. Read them on every doctrinal locus under the sun. Read three of them for every newly written book you open. If you’re lucky, you won’t only be immunized against the pathogen of whatever happens to be trending at the moment. You might just fall in love.

The truth is, the things a newfangled fad might lead you to doubt—Jesus died on the cross as a sacrifice for my sins; angels and demons are real; when I die my soul will go to heaven to be with the Lord; the Holy Spirit works miracles; the Bible tells us about things that really happened—are beliefs so basic that in any given church you might not be able to find a child or a grandparent who ever thought to question them. It usually takes a Master’s degree to do that. But pastors don’t go to seminary to learn why the simple beliefs of ordinary Christians are wrong. They go to learn, among other things, how and why they’re right. It’s a privilege to go beneath the surface, to see more than the tip of the iceberg. But that privilege comes with responsibilities. One of them is to repel every inclination to snobbery and condescension. Another is to report on the glories of what you’ve glimpsed in your deep-sea exploring (which is to say, your theological education). Above all it is your responsibility to use your knowledge to serve the people of God. One of the best ways to do that is to learn the people of God: first by loving them, then by listening to them. Listen to them as they speak today, but most of all listen to them as they speak from the past. Their voices, inscribed in countless texts, are a beacon in the darkness, if only you’ll look for the light.

Angels

A few years back I had one of those serendipitous reading moments when all at once an unexpected theme or subject emerges from disparate and seemingly unrelated texts. The first was the Space Trilogy by C. S. Lewis; the second, the Catholic Catechism; the third, On the Orthodox Faith by St. John Damascene. The topic? Angels.

Space Trilogy

Lewis’s work is saturated with the angelic, and the adventures of Ransom in space (and on earth) are no different. Among Lewis’s many gifts, as both a novelist and a theological thinker, is his ability to depict supra-cosmic creaturely life in its necessary ineffable grandeur without becoming either saccharine or anthropomorphic. The angels aren’t like us only somewhat not. They exist on a wholly other level. The image that sticks with me, from one of the first two novels in the Space Trilogy, is Ransom’s impression that, though an angel manifesting to him inside a house is somehow or other present to his senses, the angel nevertheless appears aslant—as though the axis on which he stands were unrelated to the earth’s axis, or any other in this universe.

Angels are also present in The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce, among other works. My sense is that angels serve two functions in Lewis’s spiritual imagination. First, they represent and embody a rebuttal to a disenchanted, depopulated cosmos. From one angle, it’s a simple assertion: If God exists, then there’s nothing spookier, metaphysically speaking, for there to be other spiritual beings; it’s only natural. From another angle, it’s a powerful rebuttal: If angels exist, then the very notion of a mechanistic cosmos devoid of God and the soul and the moral law is bunk.

Second, Lewis rightly portrays the angelic in its double dimension: not only the good, but also the bad. He writes of demons, in other words. No reader of the Bible could plausibly imagine that whatever created life transcends us is only beautiful and glorious; it also includes the horrific and the wicked. It includes Satan and all his pomp. Lewis thinks that is morally and metaphysically interesting, which it is, and therefore worth writing about in an age like his (and ours), which it was (and is).

Catechism

Around the time I was making my way through the Space Trilogy, I read the following section in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It comes from Part I, Paragraph 5, titled “Heaven and Earth.” It’s part of an exposition of what Christians believe, following the Rule of Faith codified in the creedal narration of biblical teaching. Here’s what it says:

The Scriptural expression “heaven and earth” means all that exists, creation in its entirety. It also indicates the bond, deep within creation, that both unites heaven and earth and distinguishes the one from the other: “the earth” is the world of men, while “heaven” or “the heavens” can designate both the firmament and God’s own “place”—”our Father in heaven” and consequently the “heaven” too which is eschatological glory. Finally, “heaven” refers to the saints and the “place” of the spiritual creatures, the angels, who surround God.

The profession of faith of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) affirms that God “from the beginning of time made at once (simul) out of nothing both orders of creatures, the spiritual and the corporeal, that is, the angelic and the earthly, and then (deinde) the human creature, who as it were shares in both orders, being composed of spirit and body.”

I. THE ANGELS

The existence of angels—a truth of faith

The existence of the spiritual, non-corporeal beings that Sacred Scripture usually calls “angels” is a truth of faith. the witness of Scripture is as clear as the unanimity of Tradition.

Who are they?

St. Augustine says: “‘Angel’ is the name of their office, not of their nature. If you seek the name of their nature, it is ‘spirit’; if you seek the name of their office, it is ‘angel’: from what they are, ‘spirit’, from what they do, ‘angel.’“ With their whole beings the angels are servants and messengers of God. Because they “always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven” they are the “mighty ones who do his word, hearkening to the voice of his word.”

As purely spiritual creatures angels have intelligence and will: they are personal and immortal creatures, surpassing in perfection all visible creatures, as the splendor of their glory bears witness.

Christ “with all his angels”

Christ is the center of the angelic world. They are his angels: “When the Son of man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him. . . .” They belong to him because they were created through and for him: “for in him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities - all things were created through him and for him.” They belong to him still more because he has made them messengers of his saving plan: “Are they not all ministering spirits sent forth to serve, for the sake of those who are to obtain salvation?”

Angels have been present since creation and throughout the history of salvation, announcing this salvation from afar or near and serving the accomplishment of the divine plan: they closed the earthly paradise; protected Lot; saved Hagar and her child; stayed Abraham’s hand; communicated the law by their ministry; led the People of God; announced births and callings; and assisted the prophets, just to cite a few examples. Finally, the angel Gabriel announced the birth of the Precursor and that of Jesus himself.

From the Incarnation to the Ascension, the life of the Word incarnate is surrounded by the adoration and service of angels. When God “brings the firstborn into the world, he says: ‘Let all God’s angels worship him.’” Their song of praise at the birth of Christ has not ceased resounding in the Church’s praise: “Glory to God in the highest!” They protect Jesus in his infancy, serve him in the desert, strengthen him in his agony in the garden, when he could have been saved by them from the hands of his enemies as Israel had been. Again, it is the angels who “evangelize” by proclaiming the Good News of Christ’s Incarnation and Resurrection. They will be present at Christ’s return, which they will announce, to serve at his judgement.

The angels in the life of the Church

In the meantime, the whole life of the Church benefits from the mysterious and powerful help of angels.

In her liturgy, the Church joins with the angels to adore the thrice-holy God. She invokes their assistance (in the Roman Canon’s Supplices te rogamus. . . [“Almighty God, we pray that your angel . . .”]; in the funeral liturgy’s In Paradisum deducant te angeli . . . [“May the angels lead you into Paradise . . .”]). Moreover, in the “Cherubic Hymn” of the Byzantine Liturgy, she celebrates the memory of certain angels more particularly (St. Michael, St. Gabriel, St. Raphael, and the guardian angels).

From its beginning to death human life is surrounded by their watchful care and intercession. “Beside each believer stands an angel as protector and shepherd leading him to life.” Already here on earth the Christian life shares by faith in the blessed company of angels and men united in God.

The claim that the existence of angels is de fide—a revealed truth of the faith incumbent on all Christians to believe—struck me like a thunderbolt. And yet the rehearsal of the witness of Scripture and sacred tradition makes clear the warrant for the assertion. Angels are everywhere in the biblical story. And as St. Luke knew well, they show up at the biggest moments. They are, as the Catechism teaches, Christ’s own angels, the heavenly messengers and soldiers of Israel’s Messiah. And they aid the church on earth in various ways, largely invisible and mysterious, but nevertheless as our guardians and helpers and, ultimately, our fellow servants of the Lord. They join us in worship. Or rather, we join them.

The Damascene

The very same week, perhaps even the same day, that I read that section of the Catechism I read the following from St. John of Damascus; it’s found in Book II, chapter 3 of An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, which was written in the early to mid eighth century:

[God] is Himself the Maker and Creator of the angels: for He brought them out of nothing into being and created them after His own image, an incorporeal race, a sort of spirit or immaterial fire: in the words of the divine David, He makes His angels spirits, and His ministers a flame of fire: and He has described their lightness and the ardor, and heat, and keenness and sharpness with which they hunger for God and serve Him, and how they are borne to the regions above and are quite delivered from all material thought.

An angel, then, is an intelligent essence, in perpetual motion, with free-will, incorporeal, ministering to God, having obtained by grace an immortal nature: and the Creator alone knows the form and limitation of its essence. But all that we can understand is, that it is incorporeal and immaterial. For all that is compared with God Who alone is incomparable, we find to be dense and material. For in reality only the Deity is immaterial and incorporeal.

The angel's nature then is rational, and intelligent, and endowed with free-will, changeable in will, or fickle. For all that is created is changeable, and only that which is uncreated is unchangeable. Also all that is rational is endowed with free-will. As it is, then, rational and intelligent, it is endowed with free-will: and as it is created, it is changeable, having power either to abide or progress in goodness, or to turn towards evil.

It is not susceptible of repentance because it is incorporeal. For it is owing to the weakness of his body that man comes to have repentance.

It is immortal, not by nature but by grace. For all that has had beginning comes also to its natural end. But God alone is eternal, or rather, He is above the Eternal: for He, the Creator of times, is not under the dominion of time, but above time.

They are secondary intelligent lights derived from that first light which is without beginning, for they have the power of illumination; they have no need of tongue or hearing, but without uttering words they communicate to each other their own thoughts and counsels.

Through the Word, therefore, all the angels were created, and through the sanctification by the Holy Spirit were they brought to perfection, sharing each in proportion to his worth and rank in brightness and grace.

They are circumscribed: for when they are in the Heaven they are not on the earth: and when they are sent by God down to the earth they do not remain in the Heaven. They are not hemmed in by walls and doors, and bars and seals, for they are quite unlimited. Unlimited, I repeat, for it is not as they really are that they reveal themselves to the worthy men to whom God wishes them to appear, but in a changed form which the beholders are capable of seeing. For that alone is naturally and strictly unlimited which is uncreated. For every created thing is limited by God Who created it.

Further, apart from their essence they receive the sanctification from the Spirit: through the divine grace they prophesy : they have no need of marriage for they are immortal.

Seeing that they are minds they are in mental places , and are not circumscribed after the fashion of a body. For they have not a bodily form by nature, nor are they extended in three dimensions. But to whatever post they may be assigned, there they are present after the manner of a mind and energize, and cannot be present and energize in various places at the same time.

Whether they are equals in essence or differ from one another we know not. God, their Creator, Who knows all things, alone knows. But they differ from each other in brightness and position, whether it is that their position is dependent on their brightness, or their brightness on their position: and they impart brightness to one another, because they excel one another in rank and nature. And clearly the higher share their brightness and knowledge with the lower.

They are mighty and prompt to fulfill the will of the Deity, and their nature is endowed with such celerity that wherever the Divine glance bids them there they are straightway found. They are the guardians of the divisions of the earth: they are set over nations and regions, allotted to them by their Creator: they govern all our affairs and bring us succor. And the reason surely is because they are set over us by the divine will and command and are ever in the vicinity of God.

With difficulty they are moved to evil, yet they are not absolutely immovable: but now they are altogether immovable, not by nature but by grace and by their nearness to the Only Good.

They behold God according to their capacity, and this is their food.

They are above us for they are incorporeal, and are free of all bodily passion, yet are not passionless: for the Deity alone is passionless.

They take different forms at the bidding of their Master, God, and thus reveal themselves to men and unveil the divine mysteries to them.

They have Heaven for their dwelling-place, and have one duty, to sing God's praise and carry out His divine will.

Moreover, as that most holy, and sacred, and gifted theologian, Dionysius the Areopagite , says, All theology, that is to say, the holy Scripture, has nine different names for the heavenly essences. These essences that divine master in sacred things divides into three groups, each containing three. And the first group, he says, consists of those who are in God's presence and are said to be directly and immediately one with Him, viz., the Seraphim with their six wings, the many-eyed Cherubim and those that sit in the holiest thrones. The second group is that of the Dominions, and the Powers, and the Authorities; and the third, and last, is that of the Rulers and Archangels and Angels.

Some, indeed, like Gregory the Theologian, say that these were before the creation of other things. He thinks that the angelic and heavenly powers were first and that thought was their function. Others, again, hold that they were created after the first heaven was made. But all are agreed that it was before the foundation of man. For myself, I am in harmony with the theologian. For it was fitting that the mental essence should be the first created, and then that which can be perceived, and finally man himself, in whose being both parts are united.

But those who say that the angels are creators of any kind of essence whatever are the mouth of their father, the devil. For since they are created things they are not creators. But He Who creates and provides for and maintains all things is God, Who alone is uncreated and is praised and glorified in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Doesn’t that fill you with awe and delight? St. John’s quotes and references could lead us down further paths: to the Pseudo-Denys and St. Gregory Nazianzen, backward to St. Augustine and forward to St. Anselm and St. Thomas Aquinas, even on to Karl Barth, who has a hefty angelology for a modern theologian.

The point I drew from this exegetical serendipity at the time, and draw now, is rather plain. Prior to reading these texts I had the theoretical knowledge of angels: I could have told you what the theological tradition says about them. But to read these two estimable authorities devote such loving attention to them, in tandem with Lewis’s novelistic rendering, brought home to me at a deeper level—in my heart, in my soul—just how wonderful as well as important the angelic is to the life of the church and the testimony of the gospel. And ever since I’ve noticed my hackles are raised, my antennae buzz, when the over-educated but under-informed among my fellow believers, but primarily among pastors, roll their eyes at ostensibly silly and outdated things like “angels and demons.” (Usually prefaced by that absurd and meaningless modifier, “literal.”) I do my best not to be That Academic who flies in to correct and rebuke. But it gets under my skin. For the condescension is wholly unearned. It’s not as though an archeologist or astronomer discovered the nonexistence of angels in 1927. They are no more subject to empirical investigation than God. Yet true-blue believers in God in the year of our Lord 2021 look down their noses on every other Christian, past and present, themselves excepted as if it were everyone else, and not themselves, who are the naive, the unenlightened. But, again, such haughty know-it-alls didn’t arrive at a considered conclusion about angelic superstition by a process of reasoning. They did so as a function of their class and education; possibly through half-skimming a now-forgotten but once-faddish academic in grad school.

To which I say: Get over yourself. There’s nothing culturally hip about being a Christian who believes all the spooky stuff—God, resurrection, incarnation, miracles, et al—minus angels. You don’t get any societal cache for it, even if it makes you feel set apart from the losers and boobs who read the Bible “literally.” Face it: You’re one of us. You’re among the shabby and disreputable, at whom the well-to-do look down their noses. Embrace it! It’s okay. It’s part of the deal.

You have our blessing. Permission granted. Believe in angels. One day you might even find that you need one.

Listening to Lewis

One of my goals for 2021 was to listen to fewer podcasts and more audiobooks—a double good, that. One of my strategies was to find novels and nonfiction on the shorter side, to gain some momentum and feel like I was making it through actual books rather than slogging through interminable chapters. One successful tack I happened upon was listening to classic shorter works of Christian thought I’d first read in my teens, specifically authors like Chesterton and Lewis. Of the latter’s books, I’ve “reread,” i.e. listened to, The Great Divorce, The Abolition of Man, The Problem of Pain, Reflections on the Psalms, Letters to Malcolm, The Weight of Glory, and Miracles.

I read most of these books in early high school. That means it’s been 20 years since I’ve opened their pages (though I’ve reread some of them since then, like The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters). During that interim I spent 13 years earning multiple degrees in biblical, religious, and theological studies, and am now in my fifth year teaching theology to undergraduates, in between publishing my first and second books. In other words, though one never “arrives” in the realm of theology, unlike my 16-year old self, I do know one or two things about the topic now. I have, as the kids say, done the reading.

What have I made of Lewis on this side of that span, then? Before answering that question I have to address another matter. That matter is Lewis’s own stature, within the theological academy and without. There is nothing—and I do mean nothing—more plebeian, rustic, and déclassé in American scholarly theological writing, at least writing that aspires to be taken seriously, than quoting C. S. Lewis (in general, much less as an authority). The reasons for this scorn are numerous. Chief among them is Lewis’s ubiquity in American evangelicalism. It’s guilt by association. One doesn’t want to give aid and comfort to them, much less cite one of their treasured masters. But not only that. Often as not, the scholar in question was himself influenced by Lewis at some crucial point in his spiritual and intellectual journey. But now he has put away such childish things; this scholar is a man. And real men don’t quote C. S. Lewis.

You might think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not, at least in many cases. There is an element of spiritual patricide, of self-conscious graduation or expulsion or liberation from the sort of class—economic, cultural, or religious—that would think Lewis was a Serious Thinker on a par with the true leading lights of the twentieth century. And since Lewis was not and never claimed to be a formal, or formally trained, theologian or philosopher, he can justly be ignored or looked down upon as, at best, the ladder one kicks away after climbing up it; or, at worst, a second-rate apologist of the unwashed evangelical masses.

To which I say: what a bunch of bunk. Listening to Lewis these last six months has brought home to me just how silly all those patronizing caricatures of him are. His reputation among the masses is more than earned. His role as an intellectual “friend,” in Stanley Hauerwas’s words, to many a searching teenager and undergraduate, is wholly justified. I’m not going to sing all his praises—for his prose, his economy of thought, his vast erudition, his wit, his bracing moral gaze—nor overlook his shortcomings—on gender, for example, though sometimes he is prescient and insightful, other times he is a man of his time or just plain weird. No, what I want to point out is that Lewis was a “real,” that is to say a bona fide or unqualified, Christian philosopher thinker, an asterisk-free theologian in the classical mold.

Listening to stray paragraphs and casual asides in Lewis’s writing from the 1940s, one realizes that his lack of formal training protected him from every manner of silly fad then dominant in “up to date” theological scholarship. That doesn’t mean he would have had nothing to learn from, say, the late Barth. (I often wonder what Barth would have made of The Screwtape Letters, and what Lewis would have made of CD IV/1.) It just means that sometimes expertise cramps the mind instead of opening it up. Reading broadly in patristic, medieval, reformation, and early modern divines is not all one needs to do to become a theologian, or to think theologically; but it’s not far from the kingdom, either.

One finds in Lewis, for example, a systematically clear and precise presentation of the intrinsic importance and interrelatedness of an extensive array of doctrines: creation ex nihilo, the transcendence and sovereignty of God, the non-being of evil, the non-competitiveness of divine and human agency, the truth of human freedom and moral responsibility, the moral and noetic effects of sin, the status of creation as good but fallen and redeemed in Christ, and the attendant consequences for human knowledge and relation to the divine. One of the things I never realized I gleaned from Lewis before I ever read so-called “real” theology was his devastating critique of every form of scientism. He inoculates his readers against it. So often ruinous to young faith, scientism is seen, with Lewis’s help, for the philosophical sham it is. He is able to do this because he has intuited the scope and rationale of basic Christian doctrine at a deep level and, with the aid of his powers of imaginative but lucid description, reproduced it in prose that hides the enormous learning behind it and is therefore accessible to the average reader. But the latter operation does not attenuate the former fact. Indeed, combining the two is a far more demanding and impressive task than mastering a field but, as a result, being capable of speaking only in one dialect: namely, the dialect of the technical scholar.

I’m well aware that Lewis needs no defense from me. For half a century there has been a veritable publishing industry devoted to extolling his virtues, including his philosophical and theological skills. And there is a laudable freedom from anxiety in true devotees of Lewis: Why should they care whether he receives his due in the halls of power and influence? All true. And a good lesson for this status-anxious holder of an Ivy League doctorate. All the same, it was a happy realization for this lifelong student of Lewis’s to realize no shine came off his works. They’re radiant as ever.

Karen Kilby book forum in Political Theology

At long last, the newest issue of the academic journal Political Theology is out, and it features a book forum I organized and edited for the journal. The forum, or roundtable discussion, is devoted to Karen Kilby’s latest book, a collection of mostly previously published essays titled God, Evil, and the Limits of Theology. Here is how the forum is laid out:

• My opening essay, “Theology in the Dark,” introduces the book’s major themes.

• Andrew Prevot, associate professor of theology at Boston College, writes about “Karen Kilby on the Politics of Not Knowing.”

• Kathryn Tanner, professor of theology at Yale Divinity School, writes on “The Limits of Political Theology.”

• Katherine Sonderegger, professor of theology at Virginia Theological Seminary, writes on “Modernity in the Theology of Karen Kilby.”

• Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury and Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, writes about what constitutes “A True Otherness.”

• Sarah Coakley, professor of theology emerita at the University of Cambridge, writes about theology and the Trinity “Beyond Understanding.”

• Miroslav Volf, professor of theology at Yale Divinity School, writes in defense of “Apophatic Social Trinitarianism: Why I Continue to Espouse ‘a Kind of’ Social Trinitarianism.”

• Karen Kilby, professor of Catholic theology at Durham University, writes a “Reply to Critics.”

Though it took a full 16 months to see the idea from conception to print, it was a pleasure to do so. What a feast. Thanks to editor Vincent Lloyd for the invitation. Now go buy Prof. Kilby’s book and read this issue of PT cover to cover

Publication round-up: recent pieces in First Things, Journal of Theological Interpretation, Mere Orthodoxy, and The Liberating Arts

I've been busy the last month, but I wanted to make sure I posted links here to some recent pieces of mine published during the Advent and Christmas seasons.

First, I wrote a meditation on the first Sunday of Advent for Mere Orthodoxy called "The Face of God."

Second, I interviewed Jon Baskin for The Liberating Arts in a video/podcast called "Can the Humanities Find a Home in the Academy?" Earlier in the fall I interviewed Alan Noble for TLA on why the church needs Christian colleges.

Third, in the latest issue of Journal of Theological Interpretation, I have a long article that seeks to answer a question simply stated: "What Are the Standards of Excellence for Theological Interpretation of Scripture?"

Fourth and last, yesterday, New Year's Day, First Things published a short essay I wrote called "The Circumcision of Israel's God." It's a theological meditation on the liturgical significance of January 1 being simultaneously the feast of the circumcision of Christ (for the East), the solemnity of Mary the Mother of God (for Rome), the feast of the name of Jesus (for many Protestants), and a global day for peace (per Pope Paul VI). I use a wonderful passage from St. Theodore the Studite's polemic against the iconoclasts to draw connections between each of these features of the one mystery of the incarnation of the God of Israel.

More to come in 2021. Lord willing it will prove a relief from the last 12 months.

100 theologians before the 20th century

Earlier this summer I set myself the task of creating a list of 100 theologians before the 20th century. Partly for myself, since I'm an inveterate list-maker and lists help me organize my reading habits; in this case, I would see where my training had left gaps and blind spots that I needed to fill in. But partly, also, for my students, who regularly ask me who they should read from the tradition—not only where to start, but a kind of curriculum or "who's who." So I set out to answer that very question: who's who?

The current list has 153 entries on it. I still want to cull it down to a clean 100, but I figured I would share it here in its unfinished, bloated form. I covet your corrections: Who am I missing? Who have I misnamed? Who is or is not a saint? Whose dates are mistaken? If you had to cull the list down to 100, which dozen (or more) figures would you nix?

I've separated the list into four groups, ranging from 32 to 50 theologians per period: patristic, medieval, reformation, and modern. The cut-offs, naturally, are bound to be arbitrary, but they're roughly accurate, I think. I'm a Westerner making a list in the West, so the Protestant Reformation is a meaningful period in a way that it isn't for the East—but then, I conclude that "age" with Dositheus II, who is a fitting representative of the East's encounter with reformed faith.

As for my goals and criteria:

First, the list is ecumenical; Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestants of every stripe are included.

Second, influence is important; I want the "relevant" names who decisively drove events, doctrines, controversies, etc.

Third, substance is important, too; indeed, on the final list I'm willing to opt for quality over legacy, if it comes down to that.

Fourth, I want epochs, traditions, regions, cultures, and languages to be disparate and representative of the church catholic at any one slice of time in history.

Fifth, orthodoxy is preferable but not required. Partly that's the nature of an ecumenical list (plenty of folks here have anathematized one another!), but even in terms of loose small-o orthodoxy, there a few whose credentials are questionable. So be it—if their thought is significant and worth engaging.

Sixth, candidates for the list have to have left substantial theological writings: St. Benedict, St. Lawrence, and St. Francis are all left off for that reason.

Seventh, I've included a few poets, but only those whose theological imaginaries have decisively informed the church's grammar and devotional practices, such as Dante and Milton; doubtless Herbert, Donne, and Hopkins, among others, could also be included, but I've left them off for now.

Eighth, the cut-off for the 20th century is difficult. What if your someone's straddles both sides of the dividing line? One criterion I used was whether a theologian's writing was equally distributed, or weighted toward the 19th century; another was whether a theologian's major work came before the year 1900. In the end, though, since (a) World War I ended in 1918, (b) Barth's Römerbrief came out in 1919, and (c) the current year is 2020, I used the "hard" cap of 1920.

Finally: Why theologians before the 20th century? First, because almost to a person, these are figures my students have never heard of and certainly have never read. Second, because duh, these are the fathers and mothers of the faith, who handed it down for 19 centuries to the present; they are worth attending to for their own sake. But third, because if I were to make a list of theologians worth reading from the last 100 years, I'd come up with at least as many names, and probably more. That's the job most seminaries and classrooms presuppose as the relevant task, apart from the stray history class or two. But that ends up sidelining the thinkers below. Imagine instead a graduate program in theology that ensured that students would read 2-4 major works by each of the theologians below (or at least by 100 of them). Imagine the theological range and depth, indeed the spiritual formation, that students would receive. Some programs are in fact trying that out. May their tribe increase.

In any case: to the list. Again, I welcome feedback. Leave a comment or drop me a line directly (brad DOT east AT acu DOT edu). Enjoy. [Update: suggested additions follow the list.]

Patristic Period

1. St. Ignatius of Antioch (d. 108)
2. St. Justin Martyr (100-165)
3. St. Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130-202)
4. St. Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-215)
5. Tertullian (c. 155-240)
6. Origen (c. 184-253)
7. St. Cyprian of Carthage (d. 258)
8. Eusebius of Caesarea (265-339)
9. St. Athanasius (c. 297-373) 10.
   
10. St. Ephrem the Syrian (c. 306-373)
    
11. St. Hilary of Poitiers (c. 315-368)
    
12. St. Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 315-386)
    
13. St. Basil the Great (c. 329-379)
    
14. St. Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 330-390)
    
15. St. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-395)
    
16. St. Ambrose (c. 340-397)
    
17. St. Jerome (c. 343-420)
    
18. St. John Chrysostom (c. 347-407)
    
19. St. Augustine of Hippo (c. 354-430)
    
20. St. John Cassian (c. 360-435)
    
21. St. Cyril of Alexandria (c. 376-444)
    
22. St. Peter Chrysologus (c. 400-450)
    
23. Pope St. Leo the Great (c. 400-461)
    
24. St. Severinus Boethius (477-524)
    
25. St. Gregory the Great (c. 540-604)
    
26. St. Isidore of Seville (c. 560-636)
    
27. Dionysius the Areopagite (c. 565-625)
    
28. St. John Climacus (c. 579-649)
    
29. St. Maximus the Confessor (c. 580-662)
    
30. St. Isaac of Nineveh (c. 613-700)
    
31. St. Bede the Venerable (c. 673-735)
    
32. St. John Damascene (c. 675-749)

Medieval Period

1. Theodore Abu Qurrah (c. 750-820)
   
2. St. Theodore of Studium (c. 759-826)
   
3. St. Photius the Great (c. 810-893)
   
4. John Scotus Eriugena (c. 815-877)
   
5. St. Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022)
   
6. St. Gregory of Narek (951-1003)
   
7. St. Peter Damian (1007-1072)
   
8. Michael Psellos (1017-1078)
   
9. St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109)
   
10. Peter Abelard (c. 1079-1142)
    
11. St. Bernard of Clairvaux (c. 1090-1153)
    
12. Peter Lombard (c. 1096-1160)
    
13. Hugh of St. Victor (c. 1096-1141)
    
14. St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179)
    
15. Nicholas of Methone (1100-1165)
    
16. Richard of St. Victor (1110-1173)
    
17. Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135-1202)
    
18. Alexander of Hales (1185-1245)
    
19. St. Anthony of Padua (1195-1231)
    
20. St. Albert the Great (c. 1200-1280)
    
21. St. Bonaventure (c. 1217-1274)
    
22. St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)
    
23. Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1328)
    
24. Dante Alighieri (c. 1265-1321)
    
25. Bl. John Duns Scotus (1265-1308)
    
26. William of Ockham (c. 1287-1347)
    
27. Bl. John van Ruysbroeck (c. 1293-1381)
    
28. Bl. Henry Suso (1295-1366)
    
29. St. Gregory Palamas (c. 1296-1357)
    
30. Johannes Tauler (1300-1361)
    
31. St. Nicholas Kabasilas (1319-1392)
    
32. John Wycliffe (c. 1320-1384)
    
33. Julian of Norwich (c. 1343-1420)
    
34. St. Catherine of Siena (c. 1347-1380)
    
35. Jan Hus (c. 1372-1415)
    
36. St. Symeon of Thessaloniki (c. 1381-1429)
    
37. St. Mark of Ephesus (1392-1444)
    
38. Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464)
    
39. Denys the Carthusian (1402-1471)
    

Reformation Period

1. Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536)
   
2. Thomas Cajetan (1469-1534)
   
3. St. Thomas More (1478-1535)
   
4. Balthasar Hubmaier (1480-1528)
   
5. Martin Luther (1483-1546)
   
6. Huldrych Zwingli (1484-1531)
   
7. Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566)
   
8. Thomas Müntzer (1489-1525)
   
9. Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556)
   
10. St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556)
    
11. Martin Bucer (1491-1551)
    
12. Menno Simmons (1496-1561)
    
13. Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560)
    
14. Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499-1562)
    
15. St. John of Ávila (1500-1569)
    
16. Heinrich Bullinger (1504-1575)
    
17. John Calvin (1509-1564)
    
18. John Knox (1514-1572)
    
19. St. Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582)
    
20. Theodore Beza (1519-1605)
    
21. St. Peter Canisius (1521-1597)
    
22. Martin Chemnitz (1522-1586)
    
23. Domingo Báñez (1528-1604)
    
24. Zacharias Ursinus (1534-1583)
    
25. Luis de Molina (1535-1600)
    
26. St. John of the Cross (1542-1591)
    
27. St. Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621)
    
28. Francisco Suárez (1548-1617)
    
29. Richard Hooker (1554-1600)
    
30. Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626)
    
31. Johann Arndt (1555-1621)
    
32. Johannes Althusius (1557-1638)
    
33. William Perkins (1558-1602)
    
34. St. Lawrence of Brindisi (1559-1619)
    
35. Jacob Arminius (1560-1609)
36. Amandus Polanus (1561-1610)
    
37. St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622)
    
38. Jakob Böhme (1575-1624)
    
39. William Ames (1576-1633)
    
40. Johann Gerhard (1582-1637)
    
41. Meletios Syrigos (1585-1664)
    
42. John of St Thomas (1589-1644)
    
43. Samuel Rutherford (1600-1661)
    
44. John Milton (1608-1674)
    
45. John Owen (1616-1683)
    
46. Francis Turretin (1623-1687)
    
47. Petrus van Mastricht (1630-1706)
    
48. Philipp Spener (1635-1705)
    
49. Thomas Traherne (c. 1636-1674)
    
50. Patriarch Dositheos II of Jerusalem (1641-1707)
    

Modern Period

1. August Hermann Francke (1663-1727)
   
2. St. Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1787)
   
3. Nicolaus Zinzendorf (1700-1760)
4. Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)
   
5. John Wesley (1703-1791)
   
6. St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain (1749-1809)
   
7. St. Seraphim of Sarov (1754-1833)
   
8. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834)
   
9. St. Philaret of Moscow (1782-1867)
   
10. Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860)
    
11. Johann Adam Möhler (1796-1838)
    
12. Charles Hodge (1797-1878)
    
13. St. John Henry Newman (1801-1890)
    
14. John Williamson Nevin (1803-1886)
    
15. Alexei Khomiakov (1804-1860)
    
16. F. D. Maurice (1805-1872)
    
17. David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874)
    
18. Isaak August Dorner (1809-1884)
    
19. Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903)
    
20. Heinrich Schmid (1811-1885)
    
21. St. Theophan the Recluse (1815-1894)
    
22. J. C. Ryle (1816-1900)
    
23. Philip Schaff (1819-1893)
    
24. Heinrich Heppe (1820-1879)
    
25. Albrecht Ritschl (1822-1889)
    
26. John of Kronstadt (1829-1909)
    
27. Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920)
    
28. B. B. Warfield (1851-1921)
    
29. Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900)
    
30. Herman Bavinck (1854-1921)
    
31. Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923)
    
32. St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897)

Suggested additions [last updated 24 July 2020]:

1. Evagrius Ponticus
   
2. The Cloud of Unknowing
   
3. Theologia Germanica
4. Francisco de Vitoria
5. Jose de Acosta
   
6. Gerard Winstanley
   
7. Blaise Pascal
8. Samuel Taylor Coleridge 
9. David Walker
   
10. Søren Kierkegaard
11. Rauschenbusch
12. Alcuin of York
    
13. Rabanus Maurus
14. Paschasius Radbertus
15. Cassiodorus
16. G. W. F. Hegel
17. George MacDonald
18. Ignaz von Döllinger
19. Tobias Beck
20. Adolf von Harnack
21. Giovanni Perrone
22. Franz Overbeck
23. August Vilmar
24. Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet
25. Léon Bloy

The hatred of theology

In the latest issue of The Point, Jon Baskin writes on behalf of the magazine's editors about what he calls "the hatred of literature." By this team he means the attitude—apparently dominant in English departments a couple decades ago and imbibed by graduate students across the land—that the study of literature exists not to appreciate its multifarious goodnesses and beauties, rooted in love for the object of study, but instead to uncover, unmask, and indict the social, moral, and political problems belonging to its conditions of production. The novel or poem is therefore not an object at all, that is to say, an end, but a means to a larger, political end; criticism thus becomes an instrument of political advocacy. The work of literary art plays no role in calling me or my convictions into question. Rather, the critic measures the work by the correctness of its views or its capacity to activate social change (for the better, that is, more or less in line with my priors), and judges its quality accordingly.

Baskin labels this approach the "hatred" of literature for two reasons. On the one hand, it does not treat literature as an end (however proximate) in itself, but only as a sort of weapon to advance or stymie the cause—whatever that may be. On the other hand, and more important, it quite literally does not arise from what usually stands as the origin story for so many students and teachers of literature: love. Love for the thing itself, for its own sake, just because. A love that does not demand agreement or relevance or revolutionary potential or the "right" politics, but only that ephemeral experience that is the root of all art: an encounter with that which outstrips the mundane, calling to the self from beyond the self. That old word "beauty" is one of the ways we try to capture such encounters.

Reading Baskin as an academically trained theologian, it made me wonder: Is there a similar phenomenon in academic theology? Does one find—or, in recent decades, could one find—in the academy "the hatred of theology"?

I think the answer is yes, in at least six ways.

First, there is a style of doing theology formally parallel to the "New Historicism." Namely, theology reduced to its sociopolitical function. What does theologoumenon X or Y accomplish with respect to certain desired political ends? There's plenty of that around, past and present.

Second, there is what some, at least in the U.K. a few decades ago, used to call "doctrinal criticism." This comprised the study of traditional doctrines from church history and the subjection of them to "critique" under the conditions and presuppositions of modernity. In other words: What is "modern man" permitted to believe, and what of the Christian dogmatic heritage must be revised, and in what ways, in order to fall in line with the Enlightenment and its heirs?

Third, in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, there was a kind of obsessive-compulsive anxiety about methodology that, as the old saw goes, never got around to actually talking about God, but only talked about talking about God. This, too, served as an avoidance strategy for academic theology.

Fourth, there is a mode of theology similar to the first example above that is nonetheless subtly different. It isn't so much about theology being merely a means to a foreordained end. But its utility as a source of or exercise in knowledge is indexed to its practical relevance. So that, e.g., the doctrine of the Trinity must have direct and obvious consequences for human social life—or else, why are we talking about it in the first place?

Fifth, a similarly practice-oriented theology is less interested in the potentially transformative implications of otherwise esoteric doctrines like the Trinity for human life. Instead, it works the other way: such doctrines are ruled out of court in advance. Only certain doctrines and topics are intrinsically practical; it is those that theology ought to attend to. Often this approach is coordinated to, or a function of, a laser-like focus on the church's life and the conduct of its ordinary members. Of what benefit is this doctrine to the average Christian? is the pressing question that filters the worthy from the unworthy loci.

Sixth and last, much theology simply proceeds with little to no reference to God as such. It is identifiable as a kind of Christian discourse (it speaks, as it were, Christianese), but the subject matter, by any reasonable account, is not the God of Christian confession. Something else is thereby sought to "make" the discourse "theological," whether or not that effort succeeds.

I should say that this is a quick and dirty list, with considerable overlap between the different items and almost certainly other examples left off. And I should clarify the quirkiness of theology compared to literature, since the analogy is imperfect at key points.

First, the subject matter of literature is literary artifacts written by human beings. Whereas the subject matter for Christian theology God: alive, on the one hand, yet inaccessible to empirical investigation, on the other. Knowledge of God is mediated by that which is not God. Furthermore, the "love" of which Baskin writes is disanalogous in the extreme compared to the "love" that grounds and sustains theology. For this latter love is personal love, directed (ideally) in complete and utter devotion to that than which nothing greater can be conceived: the author and perfecter of our very souls. Nothing similar can be said of literature (or when it is, it is sad to see).

But this only highlights the oddity, even the tragedy, of loveless theology. To speak and write about God as if he is not the all-consuming fire of one's life—as if, indeed, his existence and attributes are a matter of polite speculation—is to repudiate theology itself. Why bother? One can at least understand the literary critic who "hates" literature in Baskin's sense. In the case of the theologian who "hates" theology, and by implication theology's Sache, it is wholly unintelligible.

Second, theology has a natural home, and it is not the university or even the seminary. It is the church. So there is a community that both houses and is the beneficiary of theology's labor. In that sense theologians and believers are right to expect theology to service the church, which does at some level mean a practical effect. (That is why there is a tradition in the church that understands theology to be a practical science and not a theoretical one; compare, for example, the Franciscans to the Thomists.)

Third, theology concerns not just any God but the God revealed in Jesus Christ, who calls all people, including theologians, to follow him. This entails, in summary form, loving God with one's whole self and loving one's neighbor as oneself. The upshot: theology touches on all of life, for it considers all things in relation to God; therefore theology would be incomplete without speaking to moral, social, and political matters. Even by implication, to speak of God is inevitably to speak of issues of great human import, since that same God, who created humanity, became human in Christ and lived an exemplary life to which all are called to conform. To do theology abstracting from these facts would be a failure of serious magnitude.

The trick, then, is to balance the theoretical and practical tasks of theology without denying one in favor of the other or rendering either synonymous to the other. Above all, though, theology must never be embarrassed to be itself. And to be itself, theology must speak of God, boldly and with unbreakable faith. So to speak of God, however, means one must love God, which is the beginning and end of theology. The theologian, it turns out, is one who loves God and thus, in a manner of speaking, loves theology too.

Must theologians be faithful? A question for Volf and Croasmun

In their new book, For the Life of the World: Theology That Makes a Difference (Brazos Press, 2019), Miroslav Volf and Matthew Croasmun make the argument that the lives of theologians matter for the writing and evaluation of theological proposals. Reading through chapter 5, though, where they make the argument, I was left unsure about what exactly they were claiming. Let me offer a sample of quotations and then offer a range of interpretations of the claim or claims they are wanting to make.

(Full disclosure: Miroslav and Matthew are at Yale, and were there when I earned my doctorate; the former was a teacher, the latter a fellow student and friend. Take that for what it's worth. Here on out I'll call them V&C.)

Consider the following quotes (bolded emphases all mine):

• "execution of the central theological task requires a certain kind of affinity between the life the theologian seeks to articulate and the life the theologian seeks to lead." (118)
• "an affinity between theologians' lives and the basic vision of the true life that they seek to articulate is a condition of the adequacy of their thought." (119)
• "It would be incongruous for theologians to articulate and commend as true a life that they themselves had no aspiration of embracing. They would then be a bit like a nutritionist who won't eat her fruits and vegetables while urging her patients to do so." (120)
• "Misalignment between lives and visions ... is prone to undermine the veracity of [theologians'] work because it hinders their ability to adequately perceive and articulate these vision." (120)
• "living a certain kind of life doesn't determine the perception and articulation of visions, but only exerts significant pressure on them." (120)
• "Just as reasons, though important, don't suffice to embrace a vision of the good life, so reasons, though even more important, don't suffice to discern how to live it out. Our contention is that an abiding aspirational alignment of the self with the vision and its values is essential as well." (122)
• "[it is a requirement] that there be affinity between the kind of life theologians aspire to live and the primary vision they seek to articulate." (122)
• "Only those who are and continue to be 'spiritual' can ... perceive 'spiritual things.'" (125)
• "[An ideal but impossible claim would be] that only the saints can potentially be true theologians." (129)
• "Consequently, we argue for an affinity, rather than a strict homomorphy, of theologians' lives with the primary Christian vision of flourishing (always, of course, an affinity with the primary vision as they understand it)." (129)
• "Imperfect lives, imperfect articulations of the true life—yet lives that strive to align themselves with Christ's—and articulation that, rooted in this transformative striving, seek to serve Christ's mission to make the world God's home: this sort of affinity of life with the true life is what's needed for theologians to do their work well." (134)
• "Truth seeking is a constitutive dimension of living the true life; and living the true life—always proleptically and therefore aspirationally—is a condition of the search for its truthful articulation." (137)

It seems to me that there are a number of claims, actual or potential, interlaced and overlaid in these quotes. Consider the following, all of which are technically compatible but only some of which, I'm convinced, V&C want to affirm:

1. The best theologian will be a saint, i.e., a baptized believer whose life is maximally faithful to Christ.
2. All theologians ought to strive to be saints.
3. All theologians ought to strive to align their lives with their articulated vision of faithfulness to Christ.
4. Saints are likelier to be better theologians than those who are not.
5. A necessary but not sufficient condition of faithful theology is sainthood, that is, faithfulness to Christ.
6. A necessary but not sufficient condition of faithful theology is imperfect but real alignment between the life of a theologian and his or her articulation of faithfulness to Christ.
7. One of the criteria for evaluating a theologian's proposals and arguments is the lived faithfulness to Christ on the part of the theologian in question.
8. One of the criteria for evaluating a theologian's proposals and arguments is the alignment between that theologian's life with his or her articulation of faithfulness to Christ.

 It seems to me that the mainstream or majority Christian theological tradition would affirm claims 1 through 4. Some today would quibble with one or more of them, especially claim 4 (e.g., Paul Griffiths would say that, in via at least, those who are not yet sanctified may either have intellectual gifts greater than the saint—which is true—or have a perspective on the faith, say, as an outsider or a sinner, that the saint lacks—which, prima facie, seems more questionable). But the questions really come with claims 5 through 8.

Is it truly a condition of theology done well that the person making the theological proposals be herself (even somewhat) faithful either to Christ or to her understanding of Christ's will? Is such faithfulness, moreover, a legitimate criterion for evaluating said proposals—so that, if we knew of the theologian's utter unfaithfulness (even attempted), such knowledge would thereby falsify or disqualify her proposals outright?

I remain unpersuaded either that V&C really mean to make either of these claims or that either of them is a good idea.

It seems to me that V&C are making a materially prescriptive argument—"this is how theology ought to be done and how theologians ought to understand their work"—underwritten by a generically descriptive argument—"the sort of practice theology is and the sort of subject it is about means necessarily that it is self-involving in a manner different from algebra or astronomy"—but not anything more. We should not, I repeat not, include our judgments of the character of theologians' lives in our evaluation of their ideas, proposals, and arguments. If a serial adulterer were to write an essay against adultery, and meant it (i.e., it was not an exercise in deception), the thesis, the reasons offered in support, and the argument as a whole would not be correctly evaluated in connection with the author's sins. They would stand or fall on the merits. Such an author is precisely analogous to the comparison V&C make to the nutritionist: she is not wrong to recommend fruits and vegetables; she is merely a hypocrite.

And here's the kicker: All theologians are hypocrites. That's what makes them uniformly unsaintly, even those canonized after the fact. For saints are recognized postmortem, not in their lifetime. And that for good reason.

(I should add: It's even odder, in my view, to say that theologians' work should be judged in accordance with the affinity between their lives and their ideas, rather than their lives and the gospel as such. Barth and Tillich and Yoder, for example, all offered ample justification in their work for their misdeeds. Properly understood, however, their actions were wrong and unjustifiable regardless of the reasons they offered, precisely because they are and ought to be measured against that which is objective—the moral law, the will of God—not their own subjective understanding of it or their rationalization in the face of its challenge.)

So it is true that there should be an affinity between theologian's lives and ideas. Theologians of Christ should imitate Christ in their lives. And it is plausible to believe that their theology might improve as a result: that their vision into the things of God might prove clearer as a consequence.

But the unfaithful write good and true theology, too, and have done so since time immemorial. We ought to consider such theology in exactly the way we do all theology. For it is up to us to judge the theology only. God will judge the theologian.

The most stimulating works of systematic theology from the last 20 years

On Twitter yesterday I made an observation followed by a question. I said that Paul Griffiths' Decreation is, in my view, the most thought-provoking, stimulating, exhilarating work of systematic theology written since the first volume of Robert Jenson's systematics was published in 1997. Then I asked: What are other plausible candidates from, say, the last two decades?

I thought of half a dozen off the top of my head, then started adding others' replies to the list. See the (lightly curated) resulting list below.

A few preliminary comments, though. First, everything on the list was published (for the first time) in 1998 or later. That's arbitrary, but then, all lists are; that's what makes them fun.

Second, your mileage may vary, as mine does; I think some of these books are in a league of their own compared so some of the others. But I've tried to be broader than just my own preferences.

Third, candidates for this list are works of Christian systematic theology. As ever, the genre is loose enough that you know it when you see it. But I had to make some choices. So comparative theology is out, as is moral theology—excellent examples of the latter might be Cavanaugh's Torture and Eucharist and Herdt's Putting on Virtue. The same goes for historical theology: Ayres's Nicaea and Its Legacy, though laudably normative in many of its proposals, and arguably one of the handful of most important theological books in recent decades, is not itself an instance of systematic theology. I've similarly ruled out works of theology primarily interpreting a single theologian, past or present; so books with Augustine or Barth or whomever in the title are excluded. (I imagine this is the most contestable of the criteria. I'm only half persuaded myself, as evidenced by the exception I allowed.) Works of practical or popular or narrative theology are out too; whereas Cone's God of the Oppressed is certainly systematic theology at its most bracing, The Cross and the Lynching Tree belongs to a different genre (which, lest I be misunderstood, is not a judgment of value). Biblical scholarship is excluded from consideration as well; N. T. Wright and Richard Hays and John Barclay and Paula Fredriksen are brilliant and theologically stimulating writers, but their work is not systematic theology. Oh, and I suppose I should add: I'm limiting this to works originally written in English, if only to narrow the purview of the list (while lessening its potential hubris).

Fourth, this is not intended as a list of the "best books" from the last two decades. My words about Decreation were sharp and specific: it's a knock-your-socks-off kind of book, the sort of work you can't put down, that leads to compulsive reading, that changes your mind 10 times in as many pages, and makes you rethink, or refortify, what you always thought about this or that major topic. A book on this list should not be boring, in other words; and there are good works of scholarship that are undeniably boring. Such works are not included here.

Fifth, some might quibble with the choice of book for a given author. Should Tanner's book be Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity or Christ the Key? Should Rowan Williams's be On Christian Theology or The Edge of Words? John Webster's Holy Scripture or God Without Measure? I've opted for my own idiosyncratic preference or gut sense for what made a bigger "splash" at the time of its publication. Again: your mileage may vary.

Without further ado (ordered alphabetically):

1. Marilyn McCord Adams, Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology (2006)
2. John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (2006)
3. J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (2008)
4. Sarah Coakley, Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy, and Gender (2002)
5. Paul J. Griffiths, Decreation: The Last Things of All Creatures (2014)
6. David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (2003)
7. Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (2010)
8. David H. Kelsey, Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology (2009)
9. Matthew Levering, Scripture and Metaphysics: Aquinas and the Renewal of Trinitarian Theology (2004)
10. Alan E. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday (2003)
11. Bruce D. Marshall, Trinity and Truth (1999)
12. Eugene F. Rogers Jr., Sexuality and the Christian Body: Their Way Into the Triune God (1999)
13. Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (2015)
14. Katherine Sonderegger, Systematic Theology: Volume 1, The Doctrine of God (2015)
15. Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology (2001)
16. Linn Marie Tonstad, God and Difference: The Trinity, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Finitude (2016)
17. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship (2010)
18. John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (2003)
19. Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language (2014)
20. Frances Young, God's Presence: A Contemporary Recapitulation of Early Christianity (2013)